


Light in the Black

by Galena



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Conspiracy, Drama, Friendship, Gen, Mystery, Steganography, Technobabble, Traumatic Brain Injury, Worldbuilding, canon compliant(ish), emotional subterfuge, psychiatric care, robot spy games
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-04
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-02-28 02:39:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2715863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galena/pseuds/Galena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one aboard the Lost Light is exactly what they appear to be, including Rung. </p>
<p>When Whirl stumbles on Rung's secret, the psychiatrist must find a way to balance the goals of his mission and his duty as Whirl's doctor. On top of that, there's a dangerous conspiracy afoot and something unsettling buried in Skids' processor...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Symmetry Breaking

Rung rode the elevator down in silence, watching the floor numbers flash by in glowing glyphs. There were a dozen decks between medibay and his office. He shifted his weight, consciously aware of some slight anxiety rising in his processor. That was expected. He examined the feeling as the lift descended, patiently, watching the rhythmic flick of lights on his folded hands.

His right thumb had a glossy newness to the finish, smooth and subtly unsettling. Rung flexed his fingers. He thought he saw a microsecond of lag between the command to spread his fingers and the action. Frowning, he repeated the motion. His fingers responded smoothly. He must be imagining it.

The lift slowed.

Although his diagnostics assured him that he was entirely whole again, entirely functional, Rung felt a lingering disconnection. Sometimes he would glimpse his hand or his knee and for a moment, he would wonder who it belonged to. Then he would stare, forcing his processor to recognize that this hand was his, connected to his wrist, his arm, his shoulder. He found himself avoiding mirrored surfaces. And though he looked, by all technical measures, exactly the same as he had _before_ , Rung saw himself differently somehow. Himself, but not himself. A mask, or an imposter. A ghost.

First Aid assured him it would pass. He'd seen it before, he said, in bots who underwent extensive rebuilds of any kind. It was normal.

Rung reassured himself. He too had seen numerous patients through the disorientation, anger, denial, and recovery following a traumatic processor injury.

He wriggled his fingers again. Too shiny. His thumb didn't match.

The elevator halted and the outer doors struggled open. Rung paused before stepping into the hall. One of the light panels in the ceiling was out, a by-product of the Sparkeater incident, still not repaired, and it left a patch of shadow outside the door to his office. He reset his optics twice before he successfully interpreted it as a shadow, not as a hole in the floor. He paused and made a note of the difficulty for First Aid.

He was still recalibrating his optic feed as he stepped into the patch of shadow and palmed the lock. The door opened soundlessly and Rung faced a formless grayscale landscape within. The anxiety surged. His gaze flicked from place to place, not settling on any one shape. He hesitated. Through the bank of windows across the room, the black of deep space, salted with stars, seemed more defined, more real and welcoming, than the area in front of him. Rung felt a sudden rush of dizziness. An error code stuttered on his visual display.

“Lights,” he ordered.

Someone had cleaned and repaired the room. There were no scorch marks on the walls, no over-turned furniture. His scattered model collection had been set on his desk, missing only the Ark that Swerve had brought to him in medibay. Damaged surfaces had been patched. But there was still a faint blush of purple on the floor plating and, behind his desk, his chair was askew at the wrong angle, replaced too carefully, not pushed in naturally, and Rung remained motionless on the threshold.

He recalled only a little after putting his arms around Fortress Maximus. He remembered speaking gently to the warden and then a little hiss of sound. There was a moment of surprise, but no pain. Rung glanced toward the window. It too was fixed but he knew- tracing the trajectory with his optics- he knew that he had almost died in this room. _Twice,_ now _._ Once, if it hadn't been for Skids' timely intervention; a second time if not for Ratchet's surgical skill.

Long experience told Rung that he was hardly immune to the same issues his patients brought to him. Sometimes he would not immediately recognize or diagnose a problem with his own behaviour, but this time it was simple. Two near-fatal incidents in the same room was reason enough to make anyone avoid a place. He needed to go in now, examine the disturbing events he had experienced there, and integrate them into his memory rather than burying them. It was the same plan he had laid out for Fortress Maximus: address it, deal with it, move on.

Still, he lingered on the threshold.

Rung wasn't ready to see Fort Max yet. First Aid told him that the warden had been treated for a non-fatal wound and shut in the brig until Ultra Magnus and Rodimus came to a consensus on his fate. Rung had relayed a plea for leniency to the commanders, citing Max's still-untreated post-traumatic stress, and submitting a formal recommendation. But he wasn't personally prepared to to visit Maximus; he needed to come to terms with the whole event in steps, and visiting his office was the first.

And he stayed in the doorway, hands twining, unable to step forward. The sensor mechanism in the door whirred, trying to close and finding its path obstructed. Rung didn't notice. He needed to move but couldn't find a reason to enter and it would be worse still to step back and leave, to admit- to concede-

He set his jaw and strode across the threshold towards his desk. There. He stopped and settled his fingertips on the surface, remembering how the incident had started. He moved around behind the desk and pulled out the chair. He had been seated here, turned just so, watching Whirl meander around the office with a characteristic avoidance he paralleled in his words, seeking to distract Rung from their topic of conversation.

Rung sat down behind his desk. He remembered the flash of irritation at being interrupted; he had felt he was making progress with Whirl, felt he was close to achieving a rapport with the helicopter that would open the way to real therapeutic progress. Then, before Max had started shouting, Rung remembered a surge of fear that something somewhere must be terribly wrong and Max had only burst in to warn them.

He stood up and walked around his desk to look at the place where Whirl had finally come to rest after Maximus had battered him into submission. When the warden had failed to dismember Whirl to keep him from interfering, Max had ripped a section of cooling pipe from the ceiling and jammed it through Whirl's abdomen, pinning him to the floor.

The violence had progressed too quickly for Rung to form any coherent memory of it. The fight was a flurry of sound and colours: Maximus bellowing threats that made Whirl shriek when he carried them out, several shades of blue all jumbled together, the bright fuchsia splatter of energon, and the clatter of Whirl's heels scrabbling vainly against the deck when he found himself pinned.

When Maximus came after Rung, Whirl unleashed a barrage of mockery on the former warden; it had quickly turned vicious and he hadn't stopped until Rung's memory went black.

Rung moved to the window and laid his meticulously rebuilt hand against the transparent material. He looked through the image of his office reflected in the thick triple panes and into the distance. He felt very small for a moment. So much effort and material had been expended on his resuscitation and repair. If he had died in this room, what sort of legacy would he leave? Would Rodimus or Ultra Magnus know how to eulogize him? Did it matter how he was remembered?

Abruptly, he checked his internal chronometer. Seventeen minutes remaining before First Aid made good on his threat to send Swerve after Rung if he didn't return in a timely fashion.

Rung turned back to his desk and the model collection laid out for him. He busied himself redistributing the model ships to their original locations around the room, and he felt better for the slight return to normalcy. Spirits buoyed, Rung did another circuit of the space, pausing to familiarize himself with a few new nicks and dents, growing bolder as he remembered.

"Enough for today," he murmured to himself.

Then he turned out the lights and headed back up to medibay.

* * *

 

“So, how was it?” asked First Aid. He was consulting a live image of Rung's reconstructed processor, watching a steady series of glyphs scroll down one side of the display.

“The light is still out in front of the door,” Rung began. “Someone has been in to clean and straighten up.” He struggled after details. “My collection of ships... I put them back on the shelves.” He paused. “I knew they were all there, except this one-” he clutched the Ark in his lap, “-but I couldn't name a single one of them. I can't tell them apart.”

First Aid glanced at him. “And you're still having trouble differentiating people's faces?”

“Yes. No. Sort of. It's different now. I can tell when I'm looking at a _person_ rather than an _object_ \- except for Whirl- but I can't say who anyone is with certainty until they speak.” Rung shook his head. “It's humiliating,” he muttered.

He was finding shortcuts, new ways of identifying people, but to look at someone he had known for months or years and not recognize the collection of colours and proportions and details that made their face unique was a frightening experience.

“Not to worry,” First Aid replied. “That sounds about right. The good news is: you're improving. See here?” He pointed to the schematic display. “Two of your cerebral quadrants are now at 99% functionality. Are you experiencing any issues with hand-eye coordination? Impaired spatial orientation? Identifying colours?”

“I thought my right hand was functioning a bit sluggishly, but it may have been my imagination. No, I haven't experienced any of the other problems.” First Aid noted his responses and considered the display for a moment.

“There's still damage to your medial teneotic unit. That's responsible for the gaps and errors in your short-term memory. And here, your auto-repair is reconstructing the dorsolateral management relay responsible for synchronizing neural functions. That has priority right now; once the repairs are complete, the prospagnosia will disappear, and it'll mitigate the motor deficits you're experiencing.” He tapped the display and for a moment, they watched Rung's auto-repair perform neurosynthesis in real-time.

“My auto-repair is... building over the surgical repair.”

First Aid nodded. “The repairs we did did allowed you to regain processor functionality at a basic level, but they were always meant to be temporary. They acted as a catalyst for your own repair system to begin rebuilding you as you were. Our repairs kept you online. It's up to your own systems to repair the damage completely and faithfully.”

Rung opened and closed his right hand. “How faithfully?”

“Well, at your age, there's bound to be complications,” said First Aid. “Small-scale, you'll probably need to defragment more frequently. And you'll be missing some micro-codes, which your CPU will re-write but it'll mean some of your memory operations are slower at first.” He paused. “Bigger issues are going to be eidetic decay- what some people call 'bit rot'. There's always the possibility of fetch errors while your memory is re-indexing, and the loss of specialized self-correcting algorithms. Your memory stores are still being rebuilt and re-indexed. With the amount of physical damage your neural architecture suffered- I mean, that was _total destruction_ \- there's a high probability that there'll be pathways your auto-repair will 'forget' existed and won't rebuild.”

Rung was silent for a moment. “How much of that will be permanent?”

First Aid shook his head. “It's hard to say. You're resilient- and lucky. We'll have to wait and see for most of it. You've been keeping up with the cognitive training?”

“Yes.” Rung shifted. “It's fascinating. Using learning to attenuate physical deficits? Quite brilliant.”

“Thanks,” said First Aid, genuinely pleased. “I've been working on it for a while but I wasn't able to put it into effect during the war. They said the therapy took too long. Thanks for letting me try it on you.”

Rung paused again before speaking and he could tell that First Aid was anticipating his question. “When will you clear me to re-open my practice?”

“When I'm sure that your injuries won't affect your performance. You would do no less.” He sounded a bit testy.

“Yes, but a general time-frame-”

“Rung, you're restricted to light duties until further notice. No long hours of clinical work. No emotionally exhausting sessions with persons who may or may not be occupying the brig. Please don't make me send a memo to Ultra Magnus.”

“I won't,” Rung promised. “But-”

“When I clear you for duty, that's when.”

Rung could hear Ratchet snickering in his office.

“Yes, of course. I'm sorry,” he said. Then he looked up at First Aid and smiled. “Thank you. Sincerely. For everything you've done.”

First Aid glanced away from the schematic display. “It's nice to hear that once in a while. You're welcome.” He returned his attention to the screen. “Anyway, you're showing significant improvement- and I mean that quantitatively, not just a figure of speech- so I'm optimistic that you can be back down in your office sorting people out in a few weeks time. Until then, I want you to continue checking in daily for physical scans and cognitive training. And remember you're forbidden from watching movies, reading, or any other sort of sustained concentration.”

“There are only so many miles of corridor that I can wander before my boredom catches up with me,” Rung warned.

“Go to Swerve's and people watch. Try not to get involved in any serious conversations. And no engex.”

“Is that your recommendation as my physician?”

“Yes. Go to the bar and mingle.”

Rung must have made a face.

“Seriously. And- as much as I hate to recommend this- try to spend some time with Whirl. You need to re-teach your processor to recognize him as a person rather than an object.”

Rung nodded. “I do have some things I need to say to him.”

“Nothing too serious or emotional,” First Aid warned.

“I'll do my best,” Rung promised, and knew he was lying.

* * *

 

Finding Whirl was simple, so long as Whirl wanted to be found. He wore a locator beacon in his badge and kept his comm open like the other military bots under Ultra Magnus' command. As far as Rung knew, Whirl had not gone dark at any time aboard the _Lost Light._ He had, however, found that the shielding apparatus in the engine room reduced radio signals to blurry mush, that there was a dead section in the internal sensor array near the belly of the ship, and that stomping around like he was in a foul mood deterred most people from approaching him.

Rung enquired with the ship's internal sensors and found Whirl in the maintenance room attached to the quill reactor. The fuel quills drove the sub-light thrusters, though exactly how they worked eluded Rung as much as the workings of the _Lost Light's_ quantum propulsion system. He knew that the quills were an unusual, rather obtuse technology, one that no one aboard had any real expertise maintaining. Drift recognized them from his time in Crystal City and Highbrow had a hobby fascination with them, and together they drew up a workable technical manual.

Since no one fully understood the fuel quills, Ultra Magnus had decided that the best way to deal with them was through rigorous, constant vigilance. Temperature, vibrational frequency, isotope ratios, and more than two dozen other variables were to be noted and recorded daily. Highbrow analyzed the collected data on a weekly basis, looking for trends. Since Whirl's armour was rated to deflect the radiation thrown off by the quills, he was put into the data collection roster.

At present, Whirl had been in the maintenance room for almost two hours. Data collection usually took one hour. This told Rung that Whirl was either avoiding social contact, or he had actually found something anomalous. Rung guessed the former.

Truth be told, Rung wasn't any more ready to face Whirl than he was Fortress Maximus. The relationship he thought he had been building with the helicopter during their therapy sessions had been revealed as a fiction, based on incomplete information and assumptions. Much of what Rung thought he understood about Whirl had changed and while an inaccurate analysis wasn't constructive for any patient, Rung believed it could be downright dangerous for Whirl. And for himself, in relation to Whirl.

That was part of the problem. Whirl was his patient- had been and would be again when First Aid cleared him to return to duty. Rung could fathom a Whirl who saw a social benefit in preserving Rung's life at a cost to his own, but he had not anticipated the helicopter intervening when Fort Max threatened Rung because he claimed to see Rung as a _friend_. Yet he had done just that, and at some point, Rung would have to explain the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship to him.

There had been no meaningful communication between them yet, but Whirl appeared regularly in medibay with Skids and Swerve, and that was enough to strum Rung's nerves. In fact, Whirl's constancy was part of the reason that Rung had decided it was time to face and digest his feelings about the incident.

Now, knowing that Whirl was sequestered halfway across the ship from him, Rung took half of First Aid's advice and headed in the opposite direction, towards the bar.

* * *

Swerve's was sparsely populated at this hour. A handful of bots occupied a single large table in the centre of the establishment and one or two looked up when Rung entered. Swerve saw him and waved him up to the bar.

“On the house,” said the metallurgist-cum-bartender immediately. “What'll you have?”

“I can't have engex yet. First Aid said it will impede my auto-repair.”

Swerve made a little grimace. “Well, uh, I-”

“Actually, I was hoping you could help me. First Aid is developing a cognitive therapy regime to rehabilitate people after traumatic processor injuries and he's been using me as a study subject. I was hoping you could teach me how to mix a drink.”

Swerve's visor flickered. “I don't follow, but all right. Sure!”

Rung moved around behind the bar. “Part of the therapy involves learning cognitive tasks with a spatial or skilled motor component. Something that engages your mind and your hands, basically.”

“Is it working?”

“So far.”

“All right. Great! Let's see...” Swerve flashed him a grin, then bent to retrieve a glass, a long spoon, a strainer, and a shaker from beneath the counter.

“What are we making?” asked Rung.

“I've been calling it the 'Morning After' but it's just a tweak on an old carbonated engex recipe.” Swerve went to the refrigerated storage and beckoned to Rung. “It's traditionally big but I've been making them small. Small in the classy way, not the cheap way. Don't believe what Ratchet tells you. It's _classy._ Anyway, either I'm going to have to cave and make it bigger or make the price smaller if I want people to buy it regularly.” He pulled a container of crushed ice from the storage. “The only reason people order it is because of the ice, anyway. Frozen water is a popular ingredient right now. Have you tried it? Water solidifies at a higher temperature than engex, so it gives the drink a great texture, but it also dilutes the engex so you have options for making a drink stronger or milder, depending on taste.”

Swerve carried the ice over to the counter and gestured to the glass.

“Okay. Fill it about 3/4 with ice. It doesn't have to be perfect. Here's a little scoop.”

Rung did as he was instructed. Swerve watched him.

“So, what do you figure they're gonna do with Fort Max? I wouldn't feel safe with him just, you know, _loose_.”

Rung added another half-scoop of crushed ice to the glass. “I think the last thing Fortress Maximus needs is prolonged incarceration.”

“He told me it gives him time to think.”

Rung looked up. “You've been to speak with him?”

“Well... yeah.” Swerve returned to the refrigerator and retrieved a container of gelatinous enriched energon supplements. “I kind of figured I owed him an apology too. I _shot you_ right in front of him. And I was aiming for _him_ in the first place.” Swerve shrugged. “He's a different guy when he's not yelling and waving a massive gun around. I mean, we all have demons. You know better than anyone. I guess he just let his get to him. Still. Massive gun.”

Rung contemplated the glass full of ice.

“He's sorry for what he did,” Swerve continued, “to you, you know? He still wants to tear Prowl's head off. Not that I blame him. But it's still, you know, assault and...” Swerve's voice trailed off and he shrugged. “Anyway. Back to the drink! This is the part that's actually good for you.” He held up the container of energon supplements. “This is a trade secret. Don't tell anyone.”

Rung raised his right hand. “You have my word. Those supplements are disgusting. How do you mask the flavour?”

“Acidic flavouring and carbonated engex. The ice helps too.”

Swerve instructed him to pour a quantity of double-distilled engex into the shaker, then add a dash of flavouring, sugar, and one of the supplements.

“Shake it up for about fifteen seconds, then pour it through the strainer into the glass.”

“It's not all going to fit in that glass.”

“Well, no, it makes five servings. Just cover the bottom quarter of the glass.”

“You could serve it in a larger glass,” Rung suggested. He took care straining the mixture into the dainty vessel Swerve had provided.

“Yeah. I'm still thinking about that. Now pour the carbonated engex over it to fill the rest of the glass. Ta da!”

Rung contemplated the finished product.

“It's-”

“Classy,” Swerve interrupted. “It's _classy._ ”

“I bow to your expertise.”

“Hey! What's this?” They looked up to find Skids striding through the bar towards them, optics wide, door-wings perked, oblivious to greetings from the one populated table. He halted directly across from Swerve and Rung, and folded his arms over his chest.

“What's _what_?” said Swerve, just as Rung replied, “Classy, apparently.”

“Swerve won't let _me_ behind the bar,” Skids huffed, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the furniture in question. He eyed the tiny bubbling drink on the surface. “You should make these bigger.”

“Yeah, cause if I let _you_ back here, you'd just make drinks for yourself til you passed out on the mats. Anyway, Rung's doing cognitive- uh- something therapy.”

Skids made a face. “Come on. I'm not Trailbreaker.”

“Rehabilitative cognitive therapy with a motor component,” said Rung. “I need to use my hands to perform and learn unfamiliar tasks.”

Skids carefully picked up the glass. “Looks pretty good, Eyebrows.” Rung smiled. “Definitely drinkable.” He tossed the drink back in one gulp.

“That's not free,” said Swerve. Skids produced a handful of shanix.

“So is it helping? The cognitive motor therapy?” he asked.

Rung measured ice into a second glass. “It appears to be, yes.”

“Think it'd work for Skids amnesia?” Swerve suggested abruptly. Both Skids and Rung glanced at him.

“I don't know,” said Rung carefully. “We don't know the cause of Skids' amnesia.” He met Skids' gaze. “Do we?”

Skids shrugged. “I asked Chromedome to have a look and see what he could see.”

“Skids...” Rung began.

“Chromedome?” Swerve stuck out his tongue. “You asked the mnemosurgeon? He's had his needles in a dead guy's eye socket and you let him stick them in your neck?”

Skids frowned. “Come on, what else could I do, Rung? Everybody keeps telling me they thought I was dead, I can't remember a thing before crashing that- that shuttle, and nothing's coming back to me. I didn't know where else to start.”

Rung was silent. The group at the table beckoned Swerve away and he went, somewhat reluctantly. Rung watched Skids chew his lip for a moment, then he picked up the ice scoop and began to concoct another drink.

“I understand why you did it. Did you learn anything from Chromedome?”

“No,” Skids replied, still frowning. He claimed Rung's second cocktail but didn't drink, just held it cupped in his fingers. “He said my recent memories were gone- destroyed. And somehow, that allowed me to forget a chunk of my past that was apparently quite traumatic. All he said was that I wouldn't _want_ to remember.”

“Those past memories- they're not gone too, are they?”

Skids shook his head. “Just... buried.” He settled his lips on the edge of the tiny glass. “That's not his judgement to make though, Eyebrows. I _do_ want to remember.”

* * *

The light in the corridor was still out.

Rung noted it in his log with mild annoyance. He opened the door to his office and crossed the threshold, noting too his ability to be irritated by a minor detail like a broken light fixture. He wasn't concentrating on the room; he wasn't dreading it. That was good.

In an almost conciliatory action, he turned and looked over his shoulder. The patch of shadow was a blank space from this angle, not an exit or an entrance. It was impenetrable and pock-marked with stress fractures and impact points-

No, no it wasn't. Rung scrutinized the rectangle of black. It was just a shadow.

But no, it wasn't...

It was the outer wall of the Kimia space-station, bludgeoned into the crust of Cybertron after it fell, outer hull warped and melted from the heat of atmospheric re-entry, a stress it was never meant to withstand. And here was Rung, walking carefully along that outer wall, searching for a shadow, a shadow that was a crack, a crack that was an entrance.

He skirted the shattered hulk, pausing to look up now and then. He traced his fingertips over the blackened insulation panels and the gaps between them, and turned to gaze out fixedly across the vast wilderness he no longer recognized. Cybertron did not feel like home.

The cargo docking bay was too damaged to be re-used for its intended purpose, though some of the equipment was salvageable. The big pieces had already been removed under Bumblebee's direction; the rest had been thoroughly scavenged. Someone had begun tearing down the north walls for scrap building materials.

Rung walked until he found what he was seeking- the gap in the outer panelling, a slice of shadow. He paused, peering hesitantly at the darkness. It seemed flat, not an entrance- but he knew it was. It had been- would be- _is. Was._ Something flickered across his visual field. An error message, likely some small damage remaining from injuries sustained aboard the doomed space-station as Cyclonus tore through it...

Rung rebooted his optics. He ignored the error message. He projected indecision. Then, slowly, he stepped into the shadow, which became a gap, and paused, listening, optics turning this way and that in the gloom.

It was silent. The insulated walls muffled the sounds of materials reclamation and the space in which Rung now found himself was dusty, claustrophobic, little more than an air pocket amidst the rubble. But it was the right place. Rung switched his vision to infrared.

“Greetings,” said a voice.

Rung turned and his spark pulsed hard in dread and excitement. The shape of the speaker swam and contorted in his visual feed.

“Greetings,” he replied in a whisper.

“What is a psychiatrist doing at the edge of the waste?”

“I do not see waste,” Rung replied carefully, “I see opportunity.”

“Then,” said the speaker, “I can help you.”

Part of Rung's processor was insisting that this was not really happening. It had _happened_ , said the diagnostic code, it was not _happening._ Rung's visual cortex disagreed; this was today, now, all sensory input packets stamped with the correct date and time.

The speaker advanced a single step toward him. Rung guessed that they wore an optical identity interference cloak. The voice, too, was masked with static and shifting harmonics, and nothing in Rung's admittedly underwhelming sensor array could make sense of the speaker's near-field identification. Nevertheless, Rung recorded the conversation faithfully with his in-built microphone.

“How may I be of service, Control?” Rung asked. One thing he could say with certainty was that Control towered over him; the physical cloaking effects dared only do so much variation in appearance lest the energy signatures become detectable to curious observers. It was a subtle balance between protection and discovery.

“You have a new task.”

“In addition to my current work, or instead of it?”

“In addition. You will accompany Rodimus on his mission to find the Knights of Cybertron.”

Rung hesitated before replying. “Rodimus?” Rodimus had never been placed within the purview of their operation.

Control understood his confusion. “Rodimus is important.”

Again, Rung hesitated.

“You disagree?” said Control.

“I agree that Rodimus is important, but he isn't- Does he know about the network?”

“No. Rodimus knows nothing. He suspects nothing. This mission will be best served by your discretion.”

Rung hesitated before responding again. He felt Control's unwavering attention on him like an open furnace.

“I feel that Rodimus should be dealt with directly.”

“I do not. Rodimus is erratic, charismatic, and prone to manipulation. You, better than anyone, recognize what detrimental effect these traits might have on the network were he made aware of it's existence.”

Here Control paused and waited. Rung's processor blared, at war with itself, and he wondered why it had chosen _now_ to act up. He would need a full scan before he left Cybertron...

“Report your progress on your regular frequency every thirty-six standard hours. The nature of the mission is long-term and potentially dangerous. Employ field agents as per the normal agreement.”

“Am I to maintain my traditional cover persona?”

“You are. Do you accept the mission?”

Rung nodded once. “I accept the mission,” he said. “I am at your command.”

Control's shape shimmered around the edges. “Your service is appreciated by all Cybertronians, Rung. Your work is important.”

The encounter did not end there, but Rung's memory did, abruptly jarred back to the present by a physical proximity warning that suspended all other functions. Suddenly he was in his office aboard the _Lost Light_ , a shadow standing between himself and the light, and his processor was screaming warning on top of warning: neural patterning malfunction, imminent structural failure, weapons lock, and one damning report of a fetch error.

Distantly, he realized what had happened. That square of shadow had triggered the retrieval of a memory, but instead of opening the relevant file for review, Rung's recently-repaired neural circuits had interpreted the information in the _present tense_. He had relived the moment as it unfolded, speaking aloud as he had spoken to Control, and judging by the grip crushing his throat and the rapidly warming gun pressed to his chest, he had done so in full view of someone who took it entirely the wrong way.

“I'm gonna ask you one last time, and then I'm gonna put a hole through you: _who_ are you talking to and _what_ is 'the network'?”

Rung found himself staring into Whirl's one sulphurous optic. Distantly, he felt a rush of triumph at recognizing Whirl _as_ Whirl, not as some malevolent collection of pieces.

“Whirl! Please- don't-”

“Then you _talk_!” Whirl roared and shook him, hard enough to bring up another flurry of warnings. “Twenty seconds, doctor- if that's even what you are.”

“I- Whirl, please- please, I am-! I- yes, I'll tell you! I'll tell you.”

Whirl didn't drop him, so much as throw him down. Rung landed on his aft, every joint and circuit rattled by the impact. Whirl put his foot on Rung's chest and stomped him flat against the floor, huge and angry and terrifying. The gun in his grip was shaking.

“ _Talk,_ ” he snarled.

It was useless to lie; Rung could not remember exactly what he had said aloud, what his part in the conversation had been, and he didn't think it would be wise to access the memory again, given his accidental immersion the first time.

“I was talking to Control,” he said.

Whirl leaned over, chest guns hot and primed now, and aimed right at Rung. “You're a _spy._ ” His voice turned frigid.

“No, I'm- that's not it, I'm not a spy,” Rung replied quickly. “I'm a- I'm a-” Rung struggled to define exactly what he was with the promise of imminent death looming over him. “I'm a mobile listening post and pattern analyst.”

Whirl didn't shift. “An informant? You're a _spy_.”

“No! I- I collect information, information about individuals or places or- and I find connections within that information-”

“Enough! You're a fragging spy!”

“No- please- Whirl, I'm not-”

“What's the information for, then? _Who_ is it for?”

Rung hesitated. It was the wrong response. Whirl leaned his considerable weight onto the foot pinning Rung to the floor. His abdominal armour bent under Whirl's heel; a crack leaped across the transparent plate over his spark casing.

“I work for the Institute!” Rung gasped. “Whirl, please!”

Whirl didn't let him up. “Doesn't exist anymore.” But he didn't fire or step down any harder.

“Not like it once did,” said Rung, “and you must understand- the Institute I work for is not the one our society came to know. Skids- Skids knew the organization I worked for- he was part of it as well.” Whirl stepped off him but the gun was still pressed against his chest. Rung didn't dare move. “Senator Shockwave's group of so-called 'outliers'- that's who I started out with. I'm not- not one of them, but that's the point. They needed someone utterly normal and uninteresting to gather information for them. There were dozens of us originally, all perfectly uninteresting, all easily over-looked, and all with jobs that allowed us to absorb information across the social spectrum.”

“Go on.”

“Shop clerks, bartenders, accountants, technicians, couriers- people who hear things during the course of their work. And me. We knew- Shockwave knew- something was happening to our society, it needed-”

“Get to the point. What were you doing with the information?”

“Supporting the outliers. They needed resources. Information. Opportunities. Individuals and organizations that they could trust, people who could help them maximize the potential of their specific skills. We gathered as much information as we could so that we could find the right connections, put the right people in the right place at the right time. No one becomes extraordinary on their own. We helped them. That's what I did. What I do. I gather information, I make connections. That's the network. I'm not a spy.”

Whirl shifted, optic narrowing. “And you're in contact with them now? How?”

“No,” said Rung, and although he very much wanted to push himself up onto his elbows and assume a less vulnerable position, he didn't. “I haven't been able to contact Control since the first jump to the Outer Rim. Just now- just now I suffered a neural malfunction. I was re-living a memory, a conversation I had before I joined the crew, when Control ordered me to accompany the _Lost Light_. That's what you saw.”

Whirl's integrated cannons cooled but the muzzle of his gun still burned against Rung's chest, and he stared down, motionless and unreadable. “Guess I could ask Skids for verification but- wait, he's lost his memory. Convenient, that.”

“I know,” said Rung, “I can't offer you any more proof than my word, Whirl. Nothing has gone the way it was supposed to, right from the start.”

Whirl was quiet for a moment, staring and unreadable. “How was it supposed to go?” he asked at last.

“I was supposed to provide Rodimus with information pertinent to each situation the _Lost Light_ encountered. Much of that would be sourced through Control, but-”

“You got any other contact with your network except Control?”

Rung shook his head. “No. There are others like me but-”

“Keep each operative separate so that if one gets compromised it doesn't bring down the whole operation, yeah, I kind of know how this stuff works.” Finally, Whirl withdrew the gun and powered it down. He crouched beside Rung on the floor, still staring at him, optic shuttered to a pin-point. Finally, he said, “I should take you to Ultra Magnus.” Rung nodded once, hesitant. “You're probably lying. Dunno what you really are. Not my problem.” He stood up and glanced at Rung. “Cuz of the Matrix, right?”

“You mean Rodimus?”

“Yeah. He's not an outlier. So you're here because he's got half of the Matrix, aren't you?”

“I don't know why I was ordered here,” said Rung. “I've never heard of the network serving someone who wasn't an outlier. I honestly don't know why Control is interested in Rodimus.”

Whirl slung the gun across his shoulders. “Guess it doesn't matter. Get up.”

Rung climbed slowly to his feet. The malfunction and the physical violence left him weak and shaky. Whirl gestured for him to hurry up. He made his way to the door, through that damn patch of shadow, and down the corridor to the lift. Whirl said nothing as the elevator began to climb.

“Thank you,” Rung said softly. Whirl glanced at him. “For not shooting. And for letting me explain.”

Whirl looked away. “You're not my problem. If Ultra Magnus decides you're a spy, I'm going to kill you.” He hefted the gun with one claw.

“You don't need to do that, Whirl. I'm-”

“Shut up.”

Rung fell silent and folded his hands in front of him, watching his fingers effortlessly interlace.

 


	2. Internal Logic of Autonomous Systems

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which First Aid discusses Rung's bright spark, Rung and Brainstorm discuss gendered pronouns and holomatter avatars, and Rung and Whirl discuss Rung and Whirl.

**Chapter 2 – Internal Logic of Autonomous Systems**

 

For all his practised unobtrusiveness, Rung knew he was not completely invisible. His form was small but it was also unique, and in that he was memorable. He did not readily make friends and so he was frequently alone. In a social species, the act of being visibly, consistently alone was another small but notable aberration. And for anyone interested in history- or for someone like Rewind, with millenniums of archival material to review- Rung's repeated appearance at important times and places throughout history became less of a coincidence and more of a  pattern in the long view .

Rung turned these facts over in his processor as the lift rose. It was admirable, really, that he had not been discovered so unequivocally until now. Suspected, perhaps, as something other than, or more than, he appeared to be. But never before had he given anyone undeniable evidence of his second function.

Briefly, he lamented his decision to revisit his office before his physical recovery was complete. He frowned over the fact that the light in the hallway hadn't been replaced more quickly. He wondered why Whirl had come to his office. _Why did it have to be Whirl?_

Nothing changed the fact that Rung was caught, though. His mission was compromised before it had even begun. Ultra Magnus might be lenient with Rung's situation, might even know a rumour or two about the network, but he would still be one more unauthorized person with knowledge of Rung's purpose. Rung would have to report the development back to Control- once he regained contact- and resign himself from the mission, and perhaps from the network itself.

Rung tightened his fingers against each other. Exposure was undesirable but expulsion from the network... Rung glanced at the lift display. He had been part of the network for almost five million years.

Moving slowly enough that he wouldn't startle Whirl into violence, he reached out and pushed the _stop_ button.

Whirl casually pressed the gun to the back of his head. “What do you think you're doing?”

Rung turned to face him, unable to quash the urge to flinch as the muzzle of the gun bumped across his forehead. “Don't take me to Ultra Magnus,” he said. “You don't need to. I know you're capable of scanning me for weapons and communications equipment, and you know I have none. What is Magnus going to do that you can't?”

“Give me the _all clear_ to kill you,” Whirl replied, unblinking.

“There's no reason to kill me,” said Rung, raising his hands. “Whatever answers you want, I will give them to y-”

“No! You don't get it. I _don't care_ about your answers _._ ”

“What if Magnus decides I'm not a threat?”

“You're a threat. You're a- you're not what you're supposed to be.”

Rung kept his expression carefully neutral. “Whirl, listen to me. Give me a moment, please. Please? I'm not armed, I'm not able to send or receive a signal right now. I'm not an immediate threat. I know you know that. Please?”

Whirl said nothing. His optic contracted, then dilated, then contracted again. He jabbed Rung in the chest with the gun. “You've got ten seconds.”

Rung didn't waste time thanking him. “I'm going to make some assumptions. I'm going to assume that you're used to having people lie to you. I'm going to assume that you're usually on a 'need-to-know' basis. And you _didn't_ need to know what I am- but you _do_ now,” he said hurriedly. “I'm not lying to you; I've never lied to you. I trust Ultra Magnus, but I'm not meant to involve more people in the structure of the network than necessary. I've involved you, Whirl, without authorization and without your consent. And I am truly sorry but you're part of this now.”

Whirl watched him for another ten seconds, then the gun wavered in his grip. He lowered it.

“Fine,” he muttered. “For now. I can always kill you later.” He tapped the 'stop' button again to restart the lift. The doors opened at the next floor.

“Thank you,” Rung whispered.

Whirl shouldered the weapon and stepped out of the lift, glaring at Rung as he moved past him.

“I'll be watching you,” he warned. He paused for a moment. “No one's really as boring as you pretend to be.”

Whirl turned away and the door slid shut. In the silence, Rung pressed a hand to his forehead. He dismissed the flurry of error messages hovering at the edge of his processor and stood still for a moment, then touched the button for the medibay level.

 

* * *

 

“Whirl and I had a... case of mistaken identity,” Rung said. First Aid was seated on a low stool before him, inspecting the damage to his plating. The medic's visor dimmed with disapproval.

“What did he do?”

“Knocked me down and stepped on me,” said Rung. Annoyance bled into his voice.

“How does a case of mistaken identity merit that reaction?” fumed First Aid. He leaned closer to examine the crack in Rung's chest, then twisted to retrieve a tool. “Who could he possibly mistake you for?”

Rung heard Ratchet grumble something derogatory about Whirl's character from over his shoulder, then the sound of the CMO's footsteps. He moved to stand beside First Aid, fists on his hips.

“If you want to file a complaint and have him remanded to the brig for a spell, I'd be happy to counter-sign it.”

First Aid glanced at his superior. “I don't know if that-”

“Incarceration would do nothing to help Whirl,” said Rung.

“I wasn't talking about helping _him_ ,” Ratchet said. “This is the second time he's attacked _you_.”

“Actually, it's the fourth,” Rung murmured.

Ratchet folded his arms over his chest, frowning. “Have you considered surrendering his case to another physician?”

“I have,” Rung admitted, “once. But that isn't an option now.”

“It's always an option,” said Ratchet, voice stony. “Remember that.” He watched First Aid scan Rung's abdomen for internal damage and, when the scan came up clean, grunted and headed back to his office.

First Aid glanced up from the scanner. “Did you have a chance to talk with him?”

“A little,” Rung replied.

“Were you able to recognize him?”

“Yes, I was.”

First Aid sat up. “Well, that's something at least. All right. That should do for your plating; your auto-repair will take care of the rest. It looked worse than it actually was.” He set his tools aside. “How's your head?”

Rung told him about the fetch error, describing the symptoms without describing the specific memory.

“Hmm,” said First Aid. “That's more than just... hmm.” He turned to the neural monitor.

“What?” asked Rung.

“Well, a fetch error isn't surprising. While your memories are being re-indexed, it's an expected symptom. But the way it presented, with a visual trigger and the past experience taking over your senses? That's interesting.”

“Interesting _interesting_ ,” said Rung, “or interesting _bad_?”

“I'm not really sure. For you, it might be normal. See, your spark- Rodimus described it as 'brighter' but a better description would be that your spark energy exhibits a greater than average _amplitude_.”

“Yes,” said Rung. “It's-”

First Aid held up one finger. “Bear with me for a minute. A spark is information coded in energy that we perceive as light. Now, normal sparks- like yours and mine- appear blueish because of the _wavelength_ of the light energy. Within that wavelength, there's an amount of natural variation in _amplitude._ Usually amplitude translates to how much of a kinetic or physical load your spark can bear. A higher amplitude generally means a larger maximum body size.”

Rung nodded slowly. “Or integrated weapons, or the capacity for flight.”

“Yes. Or, sometimes, abilities that are totally unrelated to frame type.”

“Outliers, you mean,” said Rung.

“Yes.”

Rung was quiet for a moment. “I don't have any sort of unique ability, First Aid. Believe me,” he said gently, “I've been tested.”

First Aid leaned in. “By _popular definition_ , you aren't an outlier. You have a spark of exceptional amplitude partially because of your small size and a lack of specialized, integrated systems drawing on your spark energy. But even without size or systems drawing from it, your spark is still emitting far above average.” 

“It's been ascribed to natural variation,” said Rung.

First Aid lowered his voice. “Uh huh. Look, no one- including you- has any idea what the function of your alt mode is. Who's to say that your alt mode and your abilities match up at all?” He sat back again. “Anyway, the greater amplitude of your spark appears to translate to expanded non-volatile memory capacity. It's hard to put a number on that, but yours is unusually large.”

“And that has something to do with the fetch error?” Rung gamely attempted to follow First Aid's thread.

“I... maybe. Usually when a fetch error occurs, it's because you're trying to access one memory file and the address is incorrect or corrupted- or missing entirely- and you end up accessing a different memory instead. What happened to you just now sounds like a two-part error: you saw something that seemed familiar, recognized it incorrectly because the address of the correct thing was incorrect or corrupt. That was the fetch error. Then, that incorrect recognition called up a _memory_ instead of telling your processor to recognize the _present_ situation. Two separate errors.”

Rung grimaced. “That seems to be the _bad_ kind of interesting. Could it happen again?”

“Possibly. Like I said, I think this might be a by-product of your massive non-volatile memory reintegrating with your processor. With so much information to re-address and sort, there's just a higher statistical chance you'll get an error, or in your case, more than one error simultaneously. Listen, I've been studying your neural architecture but it might help if I could make daily records of your spark emissions as well.”

“If you think it will help,” Rung said.

The medic's visor brightened. “At the very least, we'll learn a bit more about your spark. Outlier or not, it is unique.”

Rung smiled at his benign enthusiasm. “It certainly doesn't hurt to understand oneself better.”

“Thought you'd go for that,” said First Aid. “We can start today. I'll just do some radiation spectrum capture for a baseline analysis. And I have a new project for you when we're done.”

“Oh?” Rung made himself comfortable on the slab. First Aid retrieved a hand-held infrascope and attached it to a stabilizing arm above his chest.

“Brainstorm's working on tweaking the holo-matter avatars, inspired by Ratchet using his to confuse Pharma. Wants to make them more energy-efficient and useful in, uh, I think he described them as 'developing situations'.”

“He wants to weaponize hard-light holographics?”

“Probably.”

“You want me to _help_ him?”

“No, I want you to do anything _but_ that. Distract him, convince him energy-efficiency is a more worthy goal, criticize the textures, anything!”

“That sounds like more mental stimulus than I've been allowed recently.”

“It is,” First Aid confirmed. “And you're still not ready to re-open your practice, by the way. But you are improving, despite what the fetch error might make you think. I'd like you to attempt this tomorrow, after you've rested.”

“Hmm.”

“Also, right now, all the avatars look the same. Personally, that's creepy. I don't look like Ratchet and neither should my holo-avatar. Although Ratchet's doesn't really scream 'Ratchet' to me either. I feel like his avatar is much too clean-cut.”

“Oh? What sort of human do you think he should look like?” asked Rung. “I will have to read up on their species if we want to create some sort of variation.”

“Something grumpier and older,” said First Aid. “Humans don't live for millions of years but they do age and Ratchet's not young. But his avatar is. I think.”

“It could represent his mental state rather than simple physical age.”

“Ah, but it doesn't.” First Aid glanced from Rung to the infrascope. “It's just a basic template. Ratchet certainly isn't _that_ either. None of us are.”

Rung stroked his chin. “The hard part would be collecting enough data concerning variation in human appearance.”

“Brainstorm's got a bunch of data on humans. He's been using it to work on the avatars. Apparently Ultra Magnus insisted that his be specially modified.”

“Indeed?”

“To resemble a human friend of his.”

“That's rather sentimental of him. I had no idea he had such familiar ties to specific humans...”

First Aid pointed one finger at him. “No. Stop psychoanalyzing. Rest now. Psychoanalyze later.”

 

* * *

 

Rung dutifully returned to his tiny hab suite, having promised to rest, but knowing he was unlikely to do so. His mind was restless.

It was his peculiar spark that had first attracted the attention of someone within the network. Perhaps it had been Senator Shockwave himself, with the authority and/or influence to access Rung's medical files. Or perhaps it had been someone like First Aid, a medic- or a technician- discretely placed to gather information, who happened upon this curiosity that couldn't be ignored.

Rung had not exactly stopped wondering who had divulged his most personal information to the network, but he had pushed the question behind more imminent concerns for thousands of years. It was there in his physical records for anyone with medical clearance to read. It had been there for the Functionists, the network, the Autobots, the Decepticons (once), and now First Aid.

The original _who_ remained unimportant. It had become a matter of _who else knew_ and _how_ it was interpreted. First Aid's literal interpretation was a relief. Rung couldn't abide suggestions of divine machination behind his origin. He was special only in ways that he chose to be, not in ways that others required.

Abruptly, Rung found himself thinking of Skids, who was special in _any_ way he chose to be. They had known each other once, years ago, occasionally worked together; they'd been friends. The network didn't frown on friendships between their agents, but neither did it celebrate them, and their specializations had taken them in different directions. Skids had moved off-planet into the Diplomatic Corps and Rung had remained on Cybertron, watchful and silent. They continued to communicate for a time, infrequently, and then not at all.

The fact that Rung hadn't seen or heard directly from Skids in years did not cause him to believe that Skids was dead. Rumours had emerged, circulated, persisted. Rung ignored them. The origin of rumours was more interesting to Rung than their veracity, and since these had no easily-traceable origin, he concluded that their fabrication and persistence were intended to provide Skids with a shield. He concluded that Skids was alive, and happily, Rung was correct.

But Skids no longer knew him. He had a brand new nick-name for Rung and he shared none of the memories that Rung recalled from their time together. He was the same bot, with the same personality, the same affectations and values that had drawn them together in the first place. Rung appreciated that. He did, he told himself, as he gazed down at his too-new thumb and dismissed a minor error message from his visual field. He could have a friendship with Skids again, but it would be starting anew.

Unless Skids found a way through his amnesia. Rung shuddered and turned away to look out the tiny porthole. Skids under a mnemosurgeon's needles. There was a time that Rung would have fought with every resource at his disposal to keep that from happening. And Skids had chosen it, oblivious to the things that might be in his head, the things that Chromedome might have seen. Was Rung still in Skids' head, a scrap of memory without an address to access it? Because Skids was carrying _something_ inside his head. Rung knew the protocols for self-imposed memory block too well not to recognize the after-effects.

He needed to know what Chromedome knew. He needed to know if he had been compromised a second time. Control would need to know. Rung dropped his gaze from the endless starfield and sighed.

His thoughts turned to Whirl. The moment in Swerve's bar when everything seemed to align at last, and he could hear and speak and respond again; Skids, intentionally mispronouncing his name, and the angular shadow behind him, yellow optic widening as Rung murmured his own name. Whirl had been there. In medibay as First Aid talked him through his first round of physical therapy, Whirl was there- some times too close, most times in the background, but always focused on him. 

When had Whirl decided that Rung was of any value to him? 

When had Whirl decided that _anyone_ had value?

No wonder he was so angry. Rung had been blind-sided by the things Whirl admitted to Fortress Maximus, by the implications those things had for their past therapy sessions, perhaps for future sessions. But Whirl must have had his own assumptions about Rung, too. Perhaps he thought he knew Rung after months of forced company, hours at a time. Perhaps familiarity inspired some affection, rather than contempt, in the helicopter.

Rung had shredded that supposed familiarity. He was not the thing that Whirl understood him to be and so Whirl was angry, at Rung for being something unexpected, at being deceived, at his own empathy for Rung. And now, in the elevator, Rung had told Whirl that he had never lied to him. That too could be interpreted as a lie. 

But if Whirl had trusted him once, he could do it again. Rung needed him to. Whirl knew who he was- more fully than anyone had since Skids had left with the Diplomatic Corps.

 

* * *

Rung did not assume, but he did suspect that Brainstorm wasn't comfortable around him. He talked at length about the holo-matter system, every word descriptive and focused on the task at hand, avoiding casual conversation. He avoided direct eye contact, too. At the beginning of their cooperation, there was an edge of annoyance in his voice.

After several frustrating hours, during which Rung suggested as many design upgrades as Brainstorm offered, the edge dulled.

“I'm not saying this impossible,” the weaponsmith announced after they had been standing in front of the holo-matter emitter for half an hour in exasperated contemplation, “I'm going to say that given the constraints in time and materials, it's _improbable_ that we'll be able to improve the energy efficiency in the near future.”

At a loss, Rung nodded. “Highly improbable.” His processor felt about ready to over heat. He had probably done more creative thinking in the past hours than First Aid would deem healthy.

“In that case, I developed a list of secondary objectives.” Brainstorm retrieved a data tablet from his work bench. Rung's vision zeroed in on the word 'projectiles'.

“Hair,” Rung said quickly.

“Hair?”

“Humans are mammals. Humans have hair. First Aid and Ratchet mentioned the hair being...” Rung spread his hands. “...unconvincing.”

Brainstorm's optics narrowed. “Unconvincing.”

Rung propped his chin in one hand, peering up at the slowly spinning hard light image of a 20-metre-tall naked human. “Ratchet and First Aid have had more contact with humans than you or I have. I suppose they would have a better idea what the hair is supposed to look like.”

“I suppose they wanted the avatars to be more energy efficient _and_ have more convincing hair.”

“Preferably,” said Rung.

“Impossible. Impossible _for now_ ,” Brainstorm added quickly. “I mean, hair is difficult to render convincingly because it's supposed to respond to the environment, but that would mean working out the physics for _every strand_ \- that's just not energy efficient at all.”

“There was also a desire to make them less uniform, more suited to the individual. If the hair is too-”

“Leave the hair to me. This 'individuality' stuff sounds like your thing.”

Rung spent the next several hours meandering through Brainstorm's collected resources on humans in a glut of self-indulgent infomania. Humans exhibited less physical variation between individuals than Cybertronians did, with the notable exception of mammalian sexual dimorphism. Rung became fascinated and utterly absorbed in his reading.

“I did make a female avatar,” said Brainstorm, when Rung finally surfaced. “Ultra Magnus' human friend is female- or was, she might be dead now- humans have ridiculously short lives- anyway, he was adamant that she be the model for his avatar.” He glanced over his shoulder at Rung. “What do you make of that?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Ultra Magnus has an alien organic friend he likes enough to physically emulate? Come on. That interests _me_.”

Rung took off his glasses and examined a light scratch in the crystal. “First Aid has strictly forbidden me from any psychoanalytic activities until he's deemed me fit and whole again.” He fitted the device back over his optics.

“Well, file it away for later, then,” said Brainstorm. “If I were you, I'd still be passively gathering data. Keep quiet, stand back, and observe. Non-involvement. That's your ticket. Nice and safe.”

Rung could not be sure if Brainstorm was making an insinuation. Due to the weaponsmith's role in various high-level Institute projects over the years, it was possible that he had, at some point, become privy to the existence of the network to which Rung belonged. However, if that was the case it was unlikely Brainstorm knew anything about Rung in particular as an agent of the network. It was more likely, Rung decided, that Brainstorm meant the suggestion as a subtle insult.

“It has served me well so far,” replied Rung, carefully non-committal. He didn't want to rise to the bait- if it was bait- and he had not been instructed to reveal himself to other network agents.

But Brainstorm was already turning back to the monitor. “I've been trying to decide whether or not to err on the side of pronouns with the assignment of sex to the avatars. Everyone aboard uses a male pronoun, I think. We could- you could- poll them. Or I could assign sex randomly. That's how it works with organics.”

Rung cocked his head. “On a purely physical scale, yes. But humans also have a personal concept of gender identity.”

“Yes, yes, but it's a scale of degrees and I have better things to do than try to perfectly match a representative gender appearance to every crew member.”

“Such as?”

“Things to build! Things to test! Things to plan! If you want to re-debate the Cybertronian interpretation of organic gender, go do it with someone else.”

Rung frowned up at Brainstorm. “When we first made contact with organic life, they were more unnerved by the lack of sexes in our species than by our mechanical nature. Sex and gender identity is integral to every organic culture we've encountered. Our lack of such makes us terribly alien to them on a fundamental level.”

“Ancient history! What's your point?”

“So the Senate at the time decided that if the Primal Vanguard were to explore the galaxy and successfully influence it, we needed to appear more familiar to the organic species we encountered. The simplest way to do that was to institute the use of gendered pronouns in speech-”

“And they picked the male pronoun because Cybertronians can't reproduce individually and neither can male organics, I know, thank you.”

“It stuck for millionsof years,” said Rung, “despite being barely accurate.”

Brainstorm lolled his head back and made a noise of exasperation. “Why do you even care?”

“Because this is interesting and I have been bored for _weeks_.”

The weaponsmith sighed. Rung waited. Then Brainstorm looked up, optics bright. “I've got it!”

“Please, share.”

“Perceptor was working on a heuristic algorithm a few years ago, something to analyze and differentiate spark types. It was supposed to allow us to quantify a bot by their spark signature alone- size, frame type, age, armaments, other details stored in the spark's persistence layer. Even if the bot had never been scanned or encountered before, the algorithm was supposed to integrate all this information into a descriptive summary: medium-sized, flight capable, 5.2 million years old, no integrated weaponry, etc., etc.”

Rung thought the idea sounded a bit controversial, but instead of voicing his observation, he merely nodded. “Go on.”

“Well, he sent me a copy to proof and even though it doesn't work- he quit work on it before I could finish making suggestions for improvement- what he has could work to quantify the major identifiers in spark types, compile those identifiers into a small number of specific classes, and assign gender appearance based on the compilation.”

Rung hesitated before replying. “I think using the algorithm is a brilliant idea since it means you don't have to write something from scratch. But... let me make a suggestion?”

Brainstorm shrugged. “All right.”

“It's a heuristic program? It can... learn?”

“Yes.”

“Could it present the results of the compilation to a person and then let them make the final decision on their gender presentation?”

Brainstorm shifted from one foot to the other, back and forth, as he thought. “Sure. That eliminates actually _asking_ everyone what their preference is. And if they don't care, then can just go with whatever the algorithm designates. Yes. Excellent! This should only take me a few hours. Whatever other human appearance stuff you're working on- work faster so we can test it by tomorrow.”

“Brainstorm, I'm not supposed to concentrate for extended periods of time,” Rung reminded him. “Doctor's orders.”

“Okay, well- just work as quickly as you can, then. Genius's orders.”

 

* * *

Despite Brainstorm's claim that he could alter the algorithm in a few hours, they both decided to call it a day long after the shift had ended.

The following day was equally long and mentally taxing. Rung didn't experience a single error message the whole time however and suggested to First Aid that perhaps the stimulation was actually good for him. First Aid nodded and continued to forbid Rung from returning to practice.

During the third day, an hour into their first test, Rung knew something was off. Something nagged at his sensors, something just beyond the limit of his underwhelming equipment. He took a moment to run a self-diagnostic; nothing appeared out of place.

“Dammit!”

Brainstorm smacked the computer terminal with the heel of his hand.

“Problem with the algorithm?”

“No. Problem with this lousy ship's lousy shields.” The weaponsmith peered behind the terminal and wiggled a cable. “Every now and then we get hit with a radiation surge- nothing serious, just universal background stuff, a bit of solar wind when we get into a star's heliosphere- nothing unexpected in deep space- anyway, the shields should be blocking the effect on electronics but... well, sometimes they don't.”

The terminal popped back to life.

“There. Didn't even lose my work.” Brainstorm stretched his fingers and then looked over at Rung. “I hope you're almost ready because I almost am.”

He turned back to his code and Rung was glad. It was _not_ background radiation. Rung identified it now, tuning specialized receptors to the correct frequency.

“How often does it happen?” Rung asked.

“You know, it didn't occur to me to keep track,” Brainstorm replied. “Hmm. If I quantified the disturbance, maybe Ultra Magnus would get interested.”

“Perhaps.”

It was Control. Seeking out Rung with the bluntest instrument in his arsenal, Control was broadcasting a blat of energy disguised as universal background radiation, hoping to ping on Rung's embedded receiver. Perhaps he had been at it ever since the  _Lost Light_ vanished, raking the heavens with an inarticulate pulse in the hopes of divining Rung's fate. The thought cheered Rung. Control valued him.

Control would need three complete, positive pings to confirm Rung's identity and location in space. If he was still searching, then he hadn't received that confirmation yet. The ship was either better shielded than Brainstorm thought or they had been moving too much, too frequently to complete the trio of signals. They were in orbit around a populated planet now. The  _Lost Light_ had stopped moving, for the time being.

Rung reached out and put his hand on the bulkhead. The signal washed through the laboratory, making lights and screens flicker. Brainstorm cursed.  _Two_ , thought Rung. His spark surged. Another burst, stronger, more focused, and Brainstorm yelped as his terminal went dead.

_Three_ .

Control had found him. Control knew he wasn't dead or lost. Rung smiled as Brainstorm rebooted the terminal and grumbled about spaceships hastily purchased by ex-Decepticons. He would be able to re-establish proper communications now, send reports and receive advice. His world began to normalize.

Rung's moment of excitement vanished as Whirl entered the lab.

“Ah, good!” said Brainstorm, beckoning to Whirl. “You got my message.”

“Always happy to test whatever fiendish genius you're putting together in here,” said Whirl. He glanced at Rung, then away. “What've you got?” He peered around Brainstorm's shoulder at the computer terminal.

“New and improved hard-light personal avatars,” said the weaponsmith.

Whirl cocked his head. “And they're armed, right? That's part of the improvement?”

Brainstorm held up one finger in a flourish. “I'm glad you asked! Step up onto the platform here.”

“What did you-?” said Rung. They both ignored him.

Brainstorm rebooted the terminal and activated the scanning platform. Whirl peered down at it with curiosity.

“That kinda tickles.”

“Perfectly normal, perfectly normal. Let me recalibrate- Rung, bring me your current build.” Brainstorm held out one hand, impatiently wriggling his fingers. Rung transferred the code he had nearly completed error-checking to a data slug and hesitantly relinquished it to the weaponsmith.

“You didn't actually arm them, did you?” he said.

Brainstorm laughed. “You wanted a comprehensive interpretation of each individual Cybertronian, right? Well, some of us have integrated weaponry. That's spark-deep stuff, important, identity-related stuff. Okay, Whirl. Get ready.”

“Bring it on.”

The scan passed up and down Whirl's body in a halo of light. The terminal processed for a second, then announced it was waiting for input. The platform powered down. Rung watched Whirl. He flexed his claws, twitched his antenna once, then put his head to the side.

“Okay, done. Come over here and jack into the terminal. Let's see what your holoform can do...”

Whirl obliged. Despite his anxiety about Brainstorm's possible weaponization of the avatars and Whirl's current animosity towards him, Rung stepped forward to join them, unbearably curious.

The hard-light generator came online. A small, vaguely tetrapodal shape appeared in front of the machine.

“Kinda small,” said Whirl.

“Humans are small,” Rung replied. They shared a glance, then mutually looked away.

After a few seconds, details began to fill in the basic outline and Whirl's holoform turned from vaguely human to a young female with one eye and what appeared to be a pair of automatic weapons in her grasp. Rung frowned at the guns.

“Awesome,” gushed the helicopter. He sat down cross-legged in front of the hologram. The holoform sat down too. “It does whatever I tell it?”

“Yup,” said Brainstorm triumphantly.

“What if I do this,” said Whirl and poked her in the forehead with one claw. The holoform reached out with one finger and mimicked the gesture, prodding at nothing in mid-air. Whirl was staring at her hand.

“Do those guns actually work?” said Rung. Brainstorm folded his arms over his chest.

“Indeed they do, though I've yet to figure out how to make the projectiles lethal.”

Rung said nothing for a moment. Whirl opened and closed his claws, then settled them in his lap. The holoform spread her tiny fingers, closed them into a fist, then slowly raised each digit individually.

“You managed to integrate a decent level of detail into the program,” said Brainstorm, somewhat grudgingly. “To make the holoform look like an individual. Well, Whirl?”

The holoform took a clumsy step forward and wobbled on her feet. Whirl raised a hand to steady her.

“You couldn't make one that walks like I do?” he grumbled.

“Humans are plantigrade,” said Brainstorm, “though I've seen images of humans with unguligrade legs. Part of their mythology or something. Anyway, I don't have time to alter that much code for just one avatar, so you'll have to adapt.”

“This feels ridiculous,” Whirl said, though he seemed more amused than annoyed as he directed his avatar to walk in a wide circle around them. “This is how you people walk?” The holoform took off at a sprint, went head over heels into a corner, got up, and came charging back to Whirl. “Cool,” he said. The avatar raised her guns and pointed them at Rung.

Rung narrowed his eyes. “Don't.” Whirl and the avatar both fixed him with a penetrating stare. Then she lowered the guns and Whirl straightened up.

“You can shoot at that wall,” Brainstorm pointed, oblivious to the tension lingering between the other two bots. Whirl's avatar turned, pointed her weapons at the designated wall, and opened fire.

Brainstorm had Whirl put the avatar through her paces, monitoring the energy usage and a real-time error-checking program while he did so. Rung watched.

Not only had Whirl quickly adapted to moving the avatar around while he himself was in motion, the avatar now conveyed herself with a lithe grace reminiscent of Whirl's own movements. She didn't stumble or hesitate on her feet. Whirl even got her to run and do a flip off the wall, landing easily in a crouch. The guns never left her grip.

But her age perturbed Rung. Whirl had been forged before the War started, putting him well over four million years old, yet his avatar appeared to be a child. Rung had poured every human physical identifier that he came across into his code, including properties of ageing. Whirl's avatar was missing an upper incisor. Humans had deciduous baby teeth that were replaced by adult dentition during childhood in a fairly strict pattern, which placed the avatar's appearance between the ages of seven and eight years old.

An equivalency in Cybertronian experience fell far short of Whirl's true age.

First Aid's advice be damned for the time being. Rung accessed an internal database and began reviewing literature, simultaneously launching an analytic subroutine that could run in the background while Rung made further passive observations. His subject romped about for another twenty minutes under Brainstorm's direction.

“Splendid!” said the weaponsmith. He turned to Rung. “Hair looks great, too, wouldn't you say?”

“You did an excellent job rendering the texture,” Rung replied. Brainstorm preened.

“We can finalize your code tomorrow. I'm going to call this a successful test run.”

Rung knew when he was being dismissed. He thanked Brainstorm for the diversion and left the lab. Truth be told, the whole experience had raised a number of new questions for Rung.

Whirl fell into step beside him several paces down the hall. He said nothing, just matched Rung step for step, hands clasped behind his back. After a full minute of silence, Rung halted.

“Can we talk?” he asked the helicopter.

“I guess.”

“In my hab suite?” Rung suggested.

“Whatever.”

They walked without speaking. Tension prickled between them like static discharge.

Rung could think of no way to ease into the conversation he needed to start. “I'm not your psychiatrist right now, but I will be again in the future. It's important for you to recognize the boundaries in that relationship and what they mean.”

“Means I'm compelled to see you whether I want to or not.”

“Yes, and it means that I'm compelled to interact with you in a professional manner.”

Whirl glanced at him. “Never stopped you from losing your temper at me.”

“You're under no obligation to listen to or internalize anything I tell you, only to show up when you have a session.” Rung stopped in front of the door to his hab suite. “I expect you to show me that much respect at least, nothing more. What you take away from our sessions is entirely up to you.”

“When you said 'talk', I thought you meant 'talk', not 'get scolded'.” But Whirl didn't leave, only half-shuttered his optic and folded his arms under his cockpit.

“Then let's talk,” said Rung and ushered him into the room.

Rung's hab suite was one of the few single-occupancy units on the ship. It afforded Rung a satisfactory amount of space but seemed far too small with Whirl in the centre of it, his stabilizers almost brushing the walls when he turned in a quick circle to give the tiny suite a hasty inspection.

“How 'bout you start by telling me what you're actually doing on this ship,” said Whirl as soon as the door closed.

“I was placed here to watch over Rodimus and feed him pertinent information throughout the journey.”

“Yeah? How's that working out for ya with a broken communication suite?”

“Not well.”

“Spoiled any assassination plots yet?”

“No.”

“So what _have_ you done?”

Rung wanted to sit down; he was tired, but he didn't feel comfortable assuming a retiring position with Whirl looming over him. “Well, I've been shot in the head and had my identity compromised.”

“Awesome track record.”

“It's been frustrating.”

Whirl cocked his head. “How long have you been at this?”

“Since before the War.”

“All that time and no one told you you're garbage at it?”

Rung quashed the urge to argue. “No, Whirl, no one has ever told me that.”

The helicopter stared for a moment, then turned away, examining Rung's personal objects on a shelf beside the data station. “You never messed up before?”

“I've messed up. I've never been discovered.”

“Get anyone killed?” Whirl prodded a small sculpture towards the edge of the shelf, perhaps debating whether or not he should give it an extra push and let gravity take over.

“Probably.”

“ _Probably._ ” There was undisguised bitterness in his voice.

“It's highly unlikely that, after being at war for so long, my work has not in some way contributed to the death of somebody, somewhere.”

Whirl looked up. “That's okay with you?”

“Of course it's not okay!” Rung snapped. He shuttered his optics for a moment. “I'm not a combatant, or a strategist. Occasionally, I'm a pattern analyst, because my psychotherapy training gives me an insight into how things connect and influence each other. Mostly, I'm an observer.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Whirl turned away from the shelf, found himself staring at a wall, turned back, agitated, paced one step away. It was all the motion he could manage in the tiny space. He vibrated with tension. Rung consciously moved away from him.

“Why does that bother you?”

Whirl shrugged, sharply. The tip of one stabilizer whacked into the wall. “Doesn't bother me. Known enough incompetent desk jockeys.” He raised one foot slightly, possibly thinking of kicking something, then lowered it. “What's one more.”

“Oh.”

“'Oh'? Really?” Whirl's tone turned vicious. “You're not going to scold me for being rude? Not gonna get all self-righteous, defend yourself?”

Cautiously, Rung approached the chair in front of the data station and sat, centimetres from Whirl. “When I first met you, I assumed you had received the _empurata_ because you had committed a criminal act.”

Whirl made a sound that eloquently conveyed several millenniums of cynicism.

“I thought you'd done something to _deserve_ it.”

The helicopter went horribly still. He became unreadable to Rung and he knew it.

Rung leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and forced himself to look at the floor. “My interpretation was wrong. I'm sorry.”

The silence was agonizing. Rung could see the tip of Whirl's pedal stabilizer and that was all. If the helicopter wanted to vent his emotional turmoil on Rung physically, he had no better opportunity: they were alone and Rung was defenceless.

But Rung could think of no swifter way to draw out Whirl's real feelings than to bring him to such a crossroads and force him to make a choice, unaided. It was manipulative and it was crude, and Whirl might even recognize that Rung was testing him. Rung waited.

“Yeah, well, you and everybody else,” Whirl muttered finally, and shifted his weight. Rung waited for a few more seconds. “You didn't know about the Sparkeater, did you.”

Rung raised his head. “No. Nobody knew about it.”

“Or the engine malfunction?”

“All I know about the engines is that I should stay away from them.”

Whirl nodded.

“And you're for sure not working for the Decepticons?”

“No, I am not working for the Decepticons.”

Whirl examined his claws, optic narrowed in thought.

“Whirl?”

“I'm thinking.”

Rung let him think.

The helicopter's stabilizers slowly relaxed. He began to slouch. Then he settled onto his haunches so he was at Rung's eye level.

“So do I have to swear an oath or something? For secrecy? In the Wreckers, we always had to sign stuff to say we wouldn't talk about sensitive missions.”

Rung shook his head. “Just promise me you won't disclose my affiliation or my mission to anyone.”

“Don't need a witness for legal purposes or anything?”

“This agreement is personal, between you and I.”

“All right.” Whirl sat down on Rung's circuit slab and propped his helm in one hand. “I promise not to tell anybody. Now what?”

Rung shifted in the chair. “Well, I have a proposition for you.”

Whirl cocked his head.

“I haven't had a partner in eons,” Rung began. “But-”

“Well, if you're just watching, whattaya need a partner for?”

“Back-up,” said Rung. He rubbed his right hand, frowning. “Protection.” Whirl's antenna perked forward. “Support. Extraction.”

“You're making it sound way more exciting than it probably is.”

Rung gave a dry laugh. “Have you been travelling on the same ship I have?”

“Point.” Then he shrugged. “Sure. I'll do it. Being your bodyguard's gotta be more fun than being your patient.”

“You'll still be my patient, Whirl. And before you agree-”

“I already agreed.”

“This is important. You _are_ my patient. I am charged with your care and safety, as your psychiatrist. That's likely going to interact with your role as my partner at some point. I need you to understand that you can choose to see a different doctor if it becomes too confusing.”

Whirl's optic dilated abruptly. “No, I can't. If I want to stay with the crew and stay an Autobot, I have to see you.”

“It would be acceptable for you to see Ratchet, or First Aid. If you feel it's necessary.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“No. I'm doing my due diligence as your doctor and informing you of your option to quit my care.”

Whirl relaxed. “All right. Diligence done. I'm your patient _and_ your bodyguard, until something goes wrong that kills us both.”

Rung pressed his lips into a disapproving line. “Whirl.”

“The fact that you ended up in all those important places at important times just to _watch_ and never got killed though, that's kind of... encouraging. How many bodyguards have you had?”

Rung raised an eyebrow. “Nine.”

“How many of them are dead?”

“Eight.”

Whirl stretched. “Well,” he said brightly, “none of them were _me_.”

* * *

With his neural scans showing fewer and fewer malfunctions every day and his spark emissions stable, First Aid cleared Rung to accompany a handful of crew to the planet below for some R&R. It went as smoothly as such a thing could, considering the crew- meaning that no one ended up in prison or dead. The trip proved enjoyable and the new holoforms were enthusiastically received. (Rung had to admit that neither he nor Brainstorm had put much effort into human naming conventions and perhaps they could use some work.) Near the end, Rung found himself wondering, in a rather surprised, sentimental fashion,  _Is this what peace is like?_

Rung ended up spending much of his time in Skids' company. It seemed to be as much by Skids' design as his own and the times that they ended up with different groups, while they all did the tourist thing and shopped and tried exotic food, Whirl stuck close to Skids.

“If there is something in his head- besides, potentially, you- can't you get it out with some psychobabble trickery?” Whirl asked later, when they had returned.

Rung ignored the word 'trickery'. “I can prescribe a repair booster, but there has to be something there to repair. I suspect there isn't.”

“But the memories are still there.”

“He didn't destroy the memories. He destroyed the addresses that make it possible for him to access the memories. That's why Chromedome was able to see some of them; his needles allow him to make physical contact with the architecture of Skids' brain and transmit a temporary pulse of-”

“Uh huh,” Whirl interrupted with intense disinterest. “And you're sure he did this to himself?”

Rung nodded. “I've seen this before. In my professional capacity and my,” he glanced at Whirl, “other professional capacity.”

“All you have to say is you recognize it.”

“I recognize it. Skids disabled his own memory access.”

Whirl seemed to be thinking this over for a moment. Then he halted mid-stride. “Hey, I know where this corridor goes. Why're you going to Ultra Magnus's office? Decided to turn yourself in?”

“No. I'm going to look through Red Alert's personal effects. Magnus has them stored in his office.”

“Why do you want to look at that stuff?”

“Because Red was my patient and I want to understand why he did what he did.”

“Yeah. I guess it's good that Skids just cut off his memory access rather than his whole head.”

Rung furrowed his eyebrows. “Whirl!”

Whirl halted several metres shy of Magnus' office. “Hey, while you're in there, check out what I wrote on the bottom of his chair. He hasn't found it yet.”

Rung sighed and touched the visitor chime. “When I'm practising again, we're going to have a conversation about ways to properly express your feelings.”

Whirl departed in a hail of cackling and rotor noise.

* * *

Red Alert had left behind discouragingly few possessions, and at first glance they were banal, uninteresting objects any bot might possess. Rung took the box of things- after signing it out from Magnus' care- and returned to his hab suite. He examined everything. Red Alert's paranoia dictated that there would be an appreciable amount of misdirection mixed into his possessions. But as Rung suspected, not everything he retrieved was exactly what it appeared to be.

The first item was a data tablet. Among the shift schedules, personnel files (variously redacted), and saved news articles was a 'to do' list 73,831 years out of date. Rung made an educated guess, tossed the characters on the list into a cryptography program of his own, and produced a mix of letters and numbers that looked suspiciously like a cypher.

The second item was a data slug.

The slug bore several layers of encryption, none of them common, but none more than moderately difficult to parse. Rung gained access to a series of files that turned out to be the _Lost Light_ 's security feeds. The slug was still receiving and archiving data from them. Rung checked several to see if they were indeed live; yes, there were Rewind and Swerve regaling a small audience in the bar with what appeared to be a re-enactment of Ultra Magnus adventures with engex; there was Rodimus with his arms folded, pouting up at Magnus while the second-in-command pointed sternly to a data pad; there was Fortress Maximus in the brig.

Rung tested a handful of the archives: bots boarding the ship, a flash of the Sparkeater, Ambulon, Rung's own still, headless body lying in medibay. A thrill of grotesque fascination passed through his circuits. Then he brought up the feed from the hallway outside his office, time-stamped from the day he had suffered the fetch error. It showed him only one angle, pointed directly at the door.

He could see the patch of shadow on the floor, and a moment later, saw himself pass over it into the room. Rung realized there was audio. He switched it on. In the video recording, Rung glanced over his shoulder toward the camera. He trembled slightly and his optics dimmed briefly. Then Whirl's shadow blotted out Rung's view of himself and the soundtrack hissed to life.

“Hey?” That was Whirl's voice, uncharacteristically tentative. “First Aid said you came down here.” Rung moved into the frame, just visible past Whirl's shoulder. He was moving stiffly, walking a weird arc towards Whirl. Whirl tracked him, moving to face him.

“Greetings,” Rung said quietly.

“Why're you down here?” asked Whirl.

“I do not see waste,” Rung replied. “I see opportunity.”

Whirl was still for a moment, then he moved one hand as though to reach out, decided against it, and shifted his weight. “It's not _that_ bad. Me and Swerve and Skids fixed most of it.” He turned away from Rung, toward the camera. “Figured I should- you know, _could_ help, a little. By doing that. Anyway, hey, you're better now, so-”

“How may I be of service, Control?”

Whirl froze. He leaned closer to stare at Rung.

“In addition to my current work, or instead of it?”

“What?” said Whirl. He glanced around the room, then back to Rung, and waved a hand in front of his face.

“Rodimus?” said Rung.

“It's _Whirl_. ”

“I agree that Rodimus is important, but he isn't- Does he know about the network?”

“Who are you talking to?” Whirl's voice had a heavy, dark quality to it that Rung had never heard before. He reached over his shoulder and put one hand on the gun strapped to his back. “What's the network?”

“I feel that Rodimus should be dealt with directly.”

Whirl's optic blazed. He brought the gun to bear on Rung. “You better start listenin' and giving me some answers real quick, doc.”

“Am I to maintain my traditional cover persona?”

At this, Whirl stamped his foot and thrust the gun into his face. “Hey! Answer me! Who are you talking to?”

Around the pressure on his vocal synthesizer, Rung rasped, “I accept the mission. I am at your command.”

Rung shut off the recording. At the very least, it confirmed that the archives were authentic and continuing to compile. It was a valuable discovery, a valuable asset.

But it would be unlike Red Alert to leave such useful information available to anyone with half a mind to break his encryptions and the skills to do it. Rung surveyed the files again.

It was not hidden amongst them. Rung found it as he began to carefully replace Red Alert's encryption layers and realized one of them had been recently altered. There was an audio file hidden within the code. Rung opened it, with a frisson of triumph.

“ _-is all my fault,”_ said Red Alert's voice, muffled and thick with static.  _“I told you about the voice and- hzzzksh!- to scare me off. Shrrrrrrhk-if you can hear me- but...”_ Rung's sense of triumph slowly coagulated into horror.  _“...there's a monster in the basement. I saw- krshkkkkk- don't know- kkkkkk- or why-”_

The recording disintegrated into a crush of noise, then nothing. Rung replayed it, filtered it, examined the file. There was nothing more to it. Red Alert had seen something down there.

“To the basement, then,” Rung murmured to himself.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Owlix for letting me bounce ideas off her, and for encouraging me to stop IMPLYING stuff and actually say it. <3 Thank you also to Dean for pointing out when I'm only making sense to myself and for error-checking my techno-babble. :) 
> 
> Sorry this chapter was late- gonna blame the holiday season- I'll do my damnedest to bring you an update with more speed next time. Thank you for reading :)


	3. The Empyrean Suite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skids has a question & Rung has a suspicion confirmed.

The visitor chime sounded at Rung's door. He tucked Red Alert's belongings back into the box, arranging them with care, and closed it before answering. Rung had not been expecting company; his focus had been on the message buried in Red Alert's surveillance video and on the security director's apparent and distressing attempt at suicide. He opened the door somewhat cautiously.

“Hypothetically speaking,” said Skids, leaning against the door frame, “if someone had an issue that you might be able to help them with and that person wasn't designated as your patient, you wouldn't be breaking First Aid's orders not to practice if you chatted with that person. Strictly hypothetical, of course.”

“Strictly hypothetical.”

“Oh, entirely.”

“Perhaps you should come in and we could discuss this hypothetical situation in greater detail?”

Rung stood aside and let Skids enter. The theoretician sat down in Rung's only chair, legs crossed, and assumed an expression of deep contemplation. He didn't speak right away.

“Clearly this proposed thought experiment involves something of a delicate nature,” Rung prompted.

Skids' mouth quirked up at one corner. “Not so much delicate; just personal. In a non-personal, hypothetical way.”

“You're just here as a concerned friend, with an interesting but utterly theoretical problem, to help exercise my logic centres.” Rung smiled. He rummaged up a package of sweets and offered one to Skids.

Skids winked and took a candy. “So theoretically, what do you know about amnesia?” he said. Rung sat down on the slab, across from Skids, and folded his hands in his lap.

“Well, I know that it can have a variety of causes,” he began.

“I assume that the treatment differs depending on the cause?”

“It can.”

“I see.” Skids ran one hand over his helm. “So, in a situation where, say, someone's recent memories had been destroyed and that destruction allowed the person to forget a bunch of older memories as well...? That sounds like two different causes to me.”

Rung nodded. “Potentially. It could be two events with different causes. Or one initial event caused by an exterior catalyst, and a second event caused by the first. Assuming it was only two events. These things can cascade, depending on the original catalyst.”

“They can?”

“In my experience, yes. Damage builds on damage.”

Skids sat back in the chair, thoughtful. “If someone knew enough about processor architecture, could they intentionally provoke that kind of cascade?”

“Hypothetically speaking?” Rung raised an eyebrow. “Yes.”

“Let's be honest for a second. What are the odds that my amnesia is accidental?”

Rung shook his head. “I don't know. Low, I think. What you've described is very thorough.”

“So it's possible that this wasn't the result of an accidental injury; someone did this to me?”

“Yes, it is possible.”

“You've seen this before?” Skids asked directly. His gaze flicked over Rung's features, worried, searching.

Rung kept his expression carefully controlled. “Not frequently. Not recently. I have seen it before.”

Skids leaned back, rubbing his optics with the heels of both hands. He sighed. “Okay.” Then he sat up again. “Is there a way to fix it? Is there a way to revive my memories?”

Rung propped his chin on his knuckles, thinking.

There were any number of reasons why Skids might have chosen to blank his own memory and all of those reasons pertained to his standing within the Diplomatic Corps or his place within the network. He had done it once long ago, before Rung had met him. It had been a starting point for their friendship; Rung asked to interview him for a first-person perspective on self-inflicted amnesia. The information was useful in both of Rung's professions and the interviews had turned into friendly meetings after several months.

“It depends on the specific damage.” Rung hesitated, not long enough to appear suspicious, but perhaps long enough to signify trepidation. “You'll need Chromedome to help you look at what's left behind for a better diagnosis.”

Skids' mouth twitched. “He didn't want to be in there any longer than he had to, Rung. I don't know if he'd be happy to help again.”

“Why?”

“He said he could see my older memories, and said something about 'knowing when to stop'.” Skids shifted forward. “Something in there made him back off. Do you have any idea how... _distracting_ that is? Something in my head- in my _past-_ scaredhim.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “He didn't seem too fond of the song, either.”

“Song?”

“I've had this song- melody- stuck in my head since I woke up. Chromedome called it the Empyrean Suite. What do you know about it?”

“Empyrean Suite?” Rung looked up. “Stuck in your head?” No, not stuck in his _head_ , Rung thought, fighting to keep his hands from fidgeting, his optics from blazing. A self-inflicted memory purge targeted the volatile memory housed in the processor. If Skids was hearing a melody, then it was stuck in his _spark,_ in the persistence layer of his immutable, non-volatile memory.

“Yeah... I've been hearing it off and on since I woke up but I didn't know what it was. Chromedome said I should be glad I didn't know what it meant. Do you know? What it means?”

“It's...” Rung pressed his lips together, eyebrows pitched down. He clasped his hands together to mask their shaking. “Well, it's a very old piece of music, with unfortunate connotations nowadays.”

“Decepticon war anthem?”

“No, older than that,” said Rung. “It was written around the time Nova Prime proposed the Primal Vanguard.”

“And the connotations?”

“Zealous patriotism. Mechacentrism to the point of racism. It celebrates Cybertron as the only source of moral truth and the physical embodiment of perfection in the galaxy.” _It means you're carrying something beautiful and terrible inside your mind, something that many people are willing to kill for._

Skids made a face. “What? Really? It doesn't even have words. Does it?”

“No. It was the spirit in which the piece was composed; purpose-written to glorify Cybertron. It was used repeatedly in propaganda campaigns and promotional rallies.”

“I'd never heard it before this. I mean, I don't think I have.” Skids propped his elbows on his knees, shoulders slumped. “I can't remember a damn thing about my own life but I can remember this music.” He shook his head.

Rung reached out and touched Skids' knee, briefly, tentatively. His hand was steady, through sheer force of will. “Then let's ask Chromedome to have a look, regardless of whether he likes what he hears inside your head.”

Skids inclined his head toward Rung, smiling a little at the touch, pleased, welcoming. “I've been thinking- well, worrying, I guess. If someone did do this to me, I want to know why. I mean, nobody seems to know where I was. Everybody keeps telling me they thought I was dead.” He looked up, met Rung's gaze. “Well, am I supposed to be dead? Does someone or some _thing_ want me dead? Did I endanger everyone on the _Lost Light_ by joining up with you? Or did I do something so - so reckless or so ill-advised or so – I don't know, pick any adjective on Whirl's resume – that I _should've_ died, but _didn't_? Because that, I want to be able to _brag_ about it, if that's it.” Then he hung his head again. “Argh! I just want to know.”

“We'll find out,” Rung said. “One way or another. If Chromedome can't help us, then we'll do it the old-fashioned way.”

“Clues, forensics, and prolonged investigation?”

“Exactly.” _Hopefully not too prolonged._

Skids smiled again. “Thanks,” he said. Then he frowned and glanced away, looking out the small porthole. “You know, it's not bad. The song, I mean. For something that's been stuck in my head for months, it's still... it's pretty listen-able. Without the context. But knowing what it is... Rung, what if it's stuck in my head because that stuff is stuff _I_ believed in? I mean, what if I recover and find out I don't like the person I used to be?”

Rung shifted his seat. “Then you can choose to stay the person you are now.”

Skids said nothing for a moment, then reclined in the chair again, resting one ankle on his opposite knee. “Yeah.” He seemed to be deep in thought for a moment. Then he flicked his yellow gaze back to Rung. “How're you doing?”

“I'm-” Rung hesitated. “I'm making progress.” He flexed the fingers of his right hand, glanced down at it. It was starting to be an unconscious gesture, opening and closing his fingers like this. _Stress related._ “First Aid wants to finish going over the differential analysis of my spark output before he clears me to return to work.”

“I meant how are you feeling?”

Rung made several attempts to answer, keenly aware that he occupied the position he normally put his own patients in, but swallowed each potential reply before he put them to words. Most of them were politeness or half-truth, but he felt that Skids' question was sincere, and deserved sincerity in response.

Finally, he shook his head. “I've had all this time and I... still...”

“Haven't really thought about it?” Skids reached out and took his hand- his right hand, the hand with the distractingly new digit. Rung let his fingers close around Skids'. “I know that problem. You're always 'on', Eyebrows. Even on Hedonia. That was supposed to be a vacation, you know.”

Rung smiled, watching Skids inspect his small fingers. “I know, and it was, truly! I enjoyed myself immensely.” And he had done, he realized, despite his injury, and his revelations to Whirl, and the whole business with Ultra Magnus in the bar, which had been a little more borderline-chaotic than Rung liked. “I was going to say that I'm still processing everything. I mean- _everything._ You're right, too. I suppose I'm 'on' because this is all such unfamiliar territory.”

“Which part?”

“All of it!” Rung confessed. “No war. Cybertron primordial. Getting shot- you know I went the entire war without receiving an injury that serious?- but the quest mostly. The quest is what unnerves me the most.”

Skids was silent for a moment, looking at their entwined fingers. “Do you believe?” asked Skids. “In the Knights?”

“That aspect of it doesn't unnerve me. It's the questing itself.”

“How's that?”

“The act of travelling, of moving physically in pursuit of a goal. It feels like progress. It temporarily allays any doubts about the goal; whether it's realistic, whether it's correct. As long as you're moving, you can measure some value for progress. I don't like that illusion.”

Skids rubbed the tactile sensor pad on his fingertip over Rung's tiny microphone, completely rewired into his thumb. “You know, you're the last person I would expect to see it that way.” He frowned slightly.

“Why?”

“Well... Because you're a psychiatrist. You know there's stages to progress, that nothing is static, that progress is long-term.” He held up both hands, letting Rung's fall back into his lap. “I'm not presuming authority here. I've just done a bit reading. I was curious about what you do.”

Rung nodded once. “Go on?”

“Every act of travelling, every little moment of motion, _is_ progress. I mean, we're not where we were last month and every place we've been so far is a place we know the Knights of Cybertron aren't. This is the beginning of the game. We've a lot ahead of us and we've got to start somewhere.”

Rung digested the words. “That's an interesting perspective,” he said at last.

Skids laughed. “Translated as: you disagree with me completely! Well, that's interesting too. What do you think, then?”

“I don't disagree completely,” Rung admitted. “You're right that we have to start somewhere. Starting is small, and daunting.” He gave Skids a tiny smile, then his face fell. “But I think we do need to worry about the goal of this quest, and I don't mean the Knights. The Knights of Cybertron are... well, at best they're a first step toward an even larger goal. At worst, we're gambling a lot on their very existence, and willingness to help us. But the real goal is a new Cybertron, a place for everyone, and although the Knights are supposed to help us, guide us how to get there...” Rung shook his head. “We should be practising what we want to become right now, in small ways, and we aren't. We're being what we've _always_ been and letting the distance we've travelled count as progress.”

Skids was quiet for a moment, studying him again. “I see,” he said at last and Rung turned his optics away. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Yes. But I reserve the right not to answer it.”

“Fair enough.” Skids leaned in. “Why are you out here?”

Rung paused before answering. The shifting, shadow-patterned form of Control lurked in his mind's eye. “For Rodimus,” he said. “He convinced me that this needs to be done.” Rung looked up. “Even if this is an illusion of progress, I think the illusion needs to be explored.”

“What's this illusion?”

“Hoping the Knights of Cybertron will have a technology or a piece of wisdom that will restore Cybertron when we find them.”

Skids pursed his lips. “That almost sounds like cynicism but I don't take you for a cynic.”

“A realist,” said Rung, firmly. “Restore Cybertron? Rebuild it? To what? Which version? The fractious, divided Cybertron in the early years when the war wasn't yet wholly consuming? The strict class system and socially-ingrained prejudices of the Functionist era? Or the values from Nova Prime's age, that produced the Empyrean Suite?”

“Oh dear,” said Skids, “you do need me here as a friend, and not at all hypothetically.”

“The Cybertron that we want to build isn't a version that we can find in history,” Rung continued. “It's something new that we've never had before. That's why I came along. It's something that's going to be built by all of us, but even though we're looking for it, we're still-” Rung gave a sharp huff from his intakes. “We're still waiting for it to come to us. We're not working on it, we're... just hoping for it. Do you see what I mean?”

Skids tilted his helm. “I think so. No, I do see what you're saying, Rung. I do. But, see, Eyebrows- the whole quest idea is what brought everyone on this ship together. I'd probably be dead if it weren't for the _Lost Light_ popping up on the right planet, at the right time. And if we're going to _make_ this happen, rather than just _waiting,_ then the first step is putting a bunch of people with good intentions in the same place. Right?”

“Yes, but-” Rung reflected for a moment. “Yes. But the quest is- hmmm. Because Rodimus-”

“'Because Rodimus',” Skids laughed. “Yes, that seems to be a reason unto itself sometimes.”

“Truly,” Rung said and smiled. “You know, you're right, Skids. You, First Aid, Ambulon- even Cyclonus and Tailgate and Whirl- none of you were supposed to be here. But you are here and it's...” He hesitated. “It's right.” He studied Skids' face for a moment, searching for a trace of the tiny Matrix emblem that the theoretician had once worn as a mark of his faith. “I want to speak with Fortress Maximus.”

“Now _there's_ someone who could use a vacation.”

Rung chuckled. “He wasn't supposed to be here either.”

“But he is, and somehow he ended up on the only ship in who-knows-how-much-volume with a Cybertronian psychiatrist on board.” Skids winked. “I don't know about you, but that seems like Providence to me. Like the universe conspired a little to finally give the guy a break.”

As soon as Skids said it, Rung could not rid himself of the idea. _Like the universe conspired a little..._ It was statistically unlikely, perhaps, but then perhaps not. Rung counted the people he had named – Skids, First Aid, Ambulon, Cyclonus, Tailgate, Whirl – and added Fortress Maximus; none of them had been signed on to the voyage; none of them figured into the original, expected configuration of the crew or the mission. But they were here now. And they each affected decisions and events in unanticipated ways.

If not for Skids, Rung remembered, he would have died at the hands of the Sparkeater.

Their conversation turned to lighter subjects, idle gossip and speculation, until Skids withdrew to let Rung rest and continue his recovery. The theoretician seemed more relaxed when he left, confident in what he needed to do.

Rung was not so lucky. He ran statistical simulations of the Sparkeater event, one after another. Without Skids on board, Rung's chances of survival tanked. After the 53rd iteration, Rung realized that if not for Whirl locking Animus out of their hab suite, and the unlucky bots demise delaying the Sparkeater as it tracked Rung, Skids could not have arrived in time. (Whirl had expressed no guilt for Animus' unintentional death; he had not known the Sparkeater existed and any other time, his antics would have been mildly annoying rather than fatal. Whirl did not blame himself and seemed to think little of it.)

Rung had no choice but to conclude that his present survival aboard the _Lost Light_ hinged on at least two persons whose presence was unanticipated. Though no one had known about the existence of the Sparkeater, either. Perhaps it was simply a series of events, unrelated and uncounted.

Perhaps it was the outcome of duelling conspiracies, one to protect Rung and his mission, and one to destroy them.

There was a fine line between paranoia and healthy suspicion in such a case. Rung's ability to recognize existing patterns in the apparent chaos of an individual's emotions, or in galactic events, the very trait that made him a useful observer for the network, relied on truthful input. But sometimes, even when a series of data was entirely authentic, it was important to remember that correlation did not imply causation. Just because events _could_ potentially be related did not mean they _were_ related. At best, it was a waste of time to analyze a pattern that didn't exist. At worst, it could distract Rung from something truly important.

But it was also Rung's experience that he should not discount such a series of events entirely. The most successful conspiracies were those too broad to be seen by a single observer, those with too subtle a pattern to evoke suspicion. The network itself functioned on exactly this principle.

In the end, Rung did not allow himself to be unduly perturbed by the series of occurrences that allowed him to be alive. Neither did he ignore it.

Most importantly, what he recognized in the conclusions of his survivability model was a lack of information. He had research to do, and questions that needed asking.

Abruptly, Rung remembered Red Alert's troubled message. _A monster in the basement._ Yes, he had to look into this. Especially now, with the hint of an opposing conspiracy whispering through his processor.

But it was late, and Rung needed rest; he was exhausted from worry and thought and simple, physical fatigue. He would look into Red's 'monster' after he recharged.

* * *

 

“You can't obfuscate with me when I'm looking at your neural read-out,” said First Aid. “You're tired and it's because you didn't recharge long enough last cycle.”

First Aid twisted in his seat to cast a peevish glance at Rung.

“All right, yes; I was up late, against your stated directive.”

“There's a 13% decrease in your auto-repair efficiency. Since _yesterday_. Don't do this again, Rung. I advised you to take it easy for good reasons.”

“I know. It was an ill-conceived idea.”

“Oh, so it was premeditated?” First Aid stood, fists on his hips, giving Rung's supine form a critical once-over, before glaring back at the read-out in front of him.

“Not as such,” Rung protested. “It was a- a cascade of events and I decided somewhere in the last quarter that I would stay up longer than advised.”

“Cascade. Uh huh. Well, try not to do it again.” First Aid shook his head and pecked at the input keys, changing the display. “Medical professionals. The worst patients.”

Rung listened to him grumble and whinge under his breath for another minute, until First Aid apparently deemed that Rung was sufficiently chastised.

“What does that area high-lighted in amber mean?” Rung asked, shifting onto his side to point at a section on the neurological display.

First Aid zoomed in. “This is a visualization of the differential analysis I performed on the non-volatile memory volume in your spark. The high-lighted sections are volumes of memory without specific addresses allocated to them.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that your spark's total memory capacity is bigger than the volume occupied by your actual memory.”

“I'm still a little...” Rung gestured helplessly. “Is that bad?”

“No,” said First Aid. “It's... different. At first, I thought it was a false report. I guessed that some sectors of your non-volatile memory were duplicated while you were recovering. I've seen it before when the connection between brain module and spark is severed by trauma. So I ran a differential analysis to find similarities- duplications- between the sectors, just in case what the scan showed was simply _one_ sector that had been reported _twice,_ which would make your memory appear larger than it actually is.”

“Okay, I follow you now.”

“But there don't appear to be any duplications. You just have... more memory sectors- more space- than you do information to fill it.”

Rung frowned. “That doesn't sound like a problem.”

“Well, it isn't. It's just odd. Volatile memory, stored in your processor- the sort that can be programmed, recorded into, erased and modified- _that_ is supposed to be larger than the information it stores. But our non-volatile memory typically holds only key programs, subroutines and memory files that let us function normally. It houses the base-line data that we need to be, you know, _us_. Language, how to walk, where we were born, that sort of immutable stuff. But your spark contains more than that.”

“Yes,” said Rung, “but we knew that already?”

“That part, yes. But we didn't know there was extra space in your spark. I was a little worried.”

“Why? Should I be-?”

“Oh, sorry! No. I was worried that the scans were inaccurate. If they were, I'd have to worry about what else they were reporting incorrectly and probably do a bunch of tests over. But no, it does work and confirms that you have a unique spark.” He straightened up, pleased with himself. “Nothing to worry about.”

Rung's hand drifted up to touch his chest, the circular translucent plate limned with the glow of his spark.

“I don't-” he began.

The medibay doors swished open and they both looked up. Rewind strode in, steps quick and sharp, evidently perturbed about something.

“Not here either?” said the archivist, with overt annoyance. He focused on First Aid and Rung. “Have either of you seen Chromedome?”

Rung shook his head.

“I haven't,” said First Aid, “but Skids was looking for him earlier; check the oil reservoir. Skids likes hanging out there and maybe he took Chromedome with him.”

Rewind huffed. “Skids is at Swerve's and he hasn't seen Chromedome either.”

First Aid shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance. “Why don't you just comm him?”

“I tried. He's not answering.” He nodded to Rung. “How's the recovery going?”

“It'd be going better if the doctor would listen to _his_ doctor,” said First Aid.

“It's going well,” said Rung with a smile.

“Sounds like it.” He glanced around again, frustrated to distraction. “Well, if you see Chromedome, get him to comm me.”

“Will do.”

Rewind slipped out the door. First Aid turned back to Rung, gesturing to the neural charts again.

“Anyway, the diff analysis only flagged your spark volume with a warning because it was outside expected parameters.”

“It's not possibly a product of my injury?”

“No. It's something you've had your whole life, a perfectly natural variation. The injury just illuminated it for you.”

Rung sat up slowly. “Well, in that case, I'll find something else to worry about.” He smiled at the medic.

“Try to do your worrying in a restful fashion, okay? Seriously.”

* * *

 

Rung chose to worry about the lack of a functional communications suite aboard the _Lost Light._ He should have checked in with Control weeks ago but the ship's own transmitter had been off-line since their quantum jump-splosion and Rung had not found an opportunity away from the ship to make contact. Now that Control knew he was still alive, an update was required as soon as possible.

Of course, Control could target Rung with long-distance communications and they could exchange information, but it required the _Lost Light_ to be stationary, which the ship rarely was. So Rung had to rely on the ship's capabilities, which were, as far as he knew, nearly repaired. The trouble was that Rung was one of 200-something bots on board with the desire to call home.

He needed to jump the queue. He thought he knew someone who could help him.

Whirl was in the quill reactor's maintenance room again. He wasn't scheduled for a shift and he had been inside for almost two hours according to the _Lost Light_ 's surveillance system. This gave Rung some cause for concern. When he arrived in the area, Rung found Ultra Magnus standing before the door, fists on his hips, glowering at nothing. He acknowledged Rung with a sideways glance.

“What did he do?” Rung guessed.

“Perpetrated an act of minor vandalism.”

Rung remembered something Whirl had said about Magnus' chair.

“Why's he in the reactor room?”

Magnus' mouth pressed into a thin line. “It bores him, and therefore offers a more effective punishment than the brig.”

“The brig isn't boring enough?”

“The brig is full of Decepticons and Fortress Maximus. That is ample material with which Whirl may amuse himself.”

“Ah. True.” He paused. “When are you planning to let him out?”

“In eleven minutes, 56 seconds.”

Rung decided to wait. “Thank you for allowing me access to Red Alert's possessions.”

Magnus nodded once. He turned his head, seemed about to speak, then appeared to reconsider.

“I didn't find any conclusive explanation for why he did what he did,” Rung said gently. “I can tell you that much.”

“Of course,” said Magnus.

Rung glanced up at the broad, insulated doors to the reactor. “However, I would be remiss if I didn't inform you that Red Alert appeared to believe that there was a malicious conspiracy of some sort taking shape aboard the ship.”

Magnus turned his full attention to Rung. “Did he have evidence of this?”

Rung thought of the fragmented video recording, and Red Alert's assertion of a 'monster'. “No,” said Rung. “He had no evidence, just a powerful belief that it existed.”

“I am aware of Red Alert's psychiatric history.”

“Yes. I still feel it's my duty to impart his belief to you, in your position as the new head of _Lost Light_ security.”

Magnus nodded. “I appreciate your diligence.”

“I appreciate that you take my concern seriously,” said Rung. He paused. “I must ask- on a similar topic, have you reconsidered allowing me to speak with Fort Max?”

Magnus' frowned deepened. “Rodimus does not believe that Fortress Maximus requires or deserves your company at this time. I am... disinclined to disagree with him.” He straightened, staring over Rung's head into the distance for a moment. “In my authority as the head of security, I could give you clearance for a visit to the brig.”

“I would appreciate that.”

Magnus studied him. “You are not to attend him as his psychiatrist, of course.”

“No. This would be a personal visit.”

“Very well.” Magnus nodded. “I will authorize it.”

“Thank-”

There was a faint trill from behind the reactor doors. Magnus straightened. Rung glanced up at him.

“What was that?”

Magnus punched his comm, frowning. “You still have seven minutes, 24 seconds, Whirl.”

“Then I guess you'll have to wait seven minutes and 24 seconds to find out what tripped the alarm,” said Whirl's voice through the comm.

“What caused the alarm?”

“Hull breach! Swarm after swarm of slimy, biological creatures with a taste for Cybertronian alloy- leave me and save yourself, Big M!”

“Whirl...”

“I dunno. There's six lights flashing on this panel and nobody bothered to label any of them.”

Magnus covered his face with one palm for a moment. “What does the diagnostic say?”

“Uh... Interference due to localized radiation spike, blah blah blah... temporal dimpling something-or-other – heh, dimpling is a funny word - some scrap measured in picometres, and... yeah, no, it's the first thing tripping the alarm. Some kind of other radiation messing with the quill radiation.”

“Messing with?” Magnus enquired.

“Not actively messing, just making odd ionization patterns around the quills, according to the diagnostic.”

“That tripped an alarm?” said Rung.

“Did you put me on speaker?” said Whirl. “Anyway, yes, it did, because it's from an unknown source and it's focused on the ship.”

Magnus eyes widened and he took a step toward the door.

“Whirl, come out of there. ”

“What about my remaining six minutes and-”

“Whirl.”

The door cycled open and Whirl stepped out into the hall, stretched, then glanced from Magnus to Rung.

“I was just starting to have fun.”

“Precisely why I pulled you out,” Magnus replied. “Rung, did you require me or did you come to see Whirl?”

“Whirl, sir.”

“I will take over the diagnostic,” he announced.

Whirl shrugged and made to leave, but Rung moved to touch Magnus' arm. “Should we be worried?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? M's always worried.”

Magnus ignored Whirl's assessment. “Certain types of focused radiation bursts can be used for clandestine intergalactic communications. I will determine if this is one such instance. There is no immediate cause for alarm.”

Once Ultra Magnus had sealed himself into the chamber, and Rung and Whirl had put several corridors between themselves and the reactor, Whirl glanced at Rung.

“So?”

“Let's talk in my suite.”

Whirl followed Rung to his hab suite, silent. Once inside, his playful edge disappeared.

“This's something to do with you, isn't it.” Whirl was glaring. Whatever good will Rung had earned yesterday was worn out now.

Rung nodded. “Control is attempting to re-establish our location. I'm long over-due to debrief him on our situation.”

“ _Re-_ establish? I thought they knew where we were.”

“He did, roughly. The trajectory the _Lost Light_ took when we departed Hedonia probably caused the signal loss; we angled for deep space, an unlikely destination.”

“Unless you're looking for something old and mysterious and probably not real. Then deep space makes sense.”

Rung raised an eyebrow. “Does it?”

Whirl put his claws on his hips and cocked his head. “People avoid flying into places like this. Places between star systems. There's nothing out here anyone could want, except maybe a place to hide. Things that want to hide are usually bad things to find.” Whirl shrugged and turned to face the porthole. “But if you're looking for something that's hiding, well, then it makes sense.”

“I suppose it does.”

“So anyway, your handler's lost us and now they're messing with our engines trying to find us?”

“The engine-messing isn't on purpose, but yes.”

Whirl tapped the transparent material of the porthole. “Hmph. Seems like Mags might be wise to your espionage tricks.

“We'll see. In the meantime, I was hoping you might do me a favour.”

“Depends.” Whirl narrowed his optic.

“Swerve said Blaster's got the comm system working again. I'm quite far down the queue for a communication back home, though. I don't suppose you...?”

Whirl made an amused chuff. “I've got no excuse to be calling home to Cybertron.”

“No?”

“Well, I guess I could call Sideswipe. Prowl stuck us together patrolling and he was all right. 'Hey, remember me? That bot you worked with for three weeks? I'm still alive!'” He waved both hands. “But if you're hoping for me to deliver some message for you, it probably won't work.”

“I was hoping we could just swap spots in line. But if you didn't sign up-”

“I didn't say that.”

Rung waited. Whirl's optic curved into an amused crescent. “So you do have a spot...?” Rung prompted.

“Yup.”

“Can we swap?”

Whirl sat down on the recharge slab. “What are you going to tell Control?”

Rung remained standing, one hand on the back of his chair. “I... I am beginning to suspect that there is more to this mission than I was lead to believe.” He looked down at his hand, gripping the metal of the chair, then looked away. “I think it may be somewhat outside my expertise and if that's true, then I have to question why I was chosen for it.”

“Are you gonna share the details of your suspicions or is this 'need to know'?” Whirl made exaggerated air quotes as only Whirl could.

Rung sighed and sat down in the chair. “I'll tell you what I know.” He shifted, propped his chin on his fist, leaned forward a little. “I don't think it was at all random that the _Lost Light_ and Skids' escape shuttle ended up in the same volume of space together. There's something in his head, something he doesn't know about, or at least doesn't _remember_ knowing about. It's something very important. And I think someone on board knows about it, and wants it.”

“So what is it? Memory of a... I don't know- boring technical, political thing?”

“It's not a memory,” said Rung. He reached down, popped open a compartment on the inside of his lower leg, and brought out a small device. Whirl's antenna perked forward, but he said nothing until Rung had activated it.

“Dampener/jammer? Now we're finally getting to the good stuff! You gonna put out a hit on somebody?”

“No, Whirl.” Rung frowned. “I think- I suspect- circumstances have lead me to believe-”

Whirl sprawled back on the slab. “Wake me up when you get to the point...”

“Skids might have the access codes to a neural retrogression program hidden in his processor.”

“I'm going to assume that's important.”

“In the interest of full disclosure, Whirl... you're on my list of potential suspects.”

Whirl sat up. “Suspects for what?”

“Whoever wants the codes. Whoever is acting counter to my mission.”

Whirl's optic contracted and he stared fixedly, long enough to make Rung apprehensive. Then he flopped back down. “I'd suspect me too. And,” he raised one claw, “I'd suspect Chromedome, because he worked for the New Institute and they like to mess around with people's brains. And Brainstorm because he worked there too, and maybe Rewind, because he knows pretty much anything Chromedome knows. Let's throw in Ultra Magnus too, because he's been up to his helm crest in special access programs and top secret shenanigans for millions of years. And the medics. Medics know everything about everyone.” He tilted his helm to peer past his own cockpit at Rung. “Especially First Aid. He's nosey and he's bored. Throw Skids on your list too - maybe he's faking. Hell, let's suspect Tailgate - who actually spends six million years in a _hole_? And-”

“Aside from Tailgate, you just laid out my entire list of suspects.” Rung raised his eyebrows. “I forgot you were a police officer, once.”

“Yeah, once. And we both know how that ended.” Whirl pushed himself up on his elbows. “So what's a 'neural retrogression program'?”

“A program that can repair certain mnemosurgical alterations .”

“What kinds?”

“It was designed to reverse Shadowplay.”

Whirl scoffed and stared up at the ceiling. “Oh, Rung. You sound so serious!”

“I am serious.”

“Shadowplay is permanent.”

Rung shook his head. “It isn't. Or rather, it doesn't have to be.”

Whirl didn't say anything for a moment. Rung could not guess his emotional response from his body language, but when he did speak, he seemed indifferent. “Is that all it does?”

“That's the function of the program, yes.”

“Could it fix a minor mnemosurgical alteration?”

Rung nodded. “Yes, it was tested on-”

“Wait, you've _used_ this program?”

“I was party to its creation.”

“Party to. You helped write it.” Whirl sat up straight and pointed at him. “ _That's_ why you were helping Brainstorm.”

“Brainstorm?”

“With the human avatar things! In his lab! How did he know you were capable of coding something like that? I mean, he's smart, but he's smart about _weapons,_ not people.”

“He didn't,” Rung said, slowly. “First Aid told me to help him. Brainstorm didn't question my ability but it was First Aid who suggested it.”

“So they're both firmly on the suspect list, then. Wait, you distracted me.” He reached out and tapped a claw against Rung's chest. “Tell me about this program.”

“Are you going to interrupt me every time I use technical terms?”

“Probably.”

“Then this might take a while.”

“You're stalling.”

Rung acknowledged that he was.

“The network wrote it,” he began. He settled back in the chair. “I don't know who had the initial idea or started the coding; it was shared out in small parcels to different network members. No part of the code on its own could give away the intended purpose of the whole. But they needed someone to integrate the parts once they were finished and that was my job.” He paused, took off his spectacles, frowned at their spotless lenses, and put them back on, aware that he was fidgeting. “It was good work.”

“'Good work',” echoed Whirl.

“The New Institute used mnemosurgery to manipulate or coerce a number of Autobots during the War. Their own side. By their comrades.” Rung was aware that he was frowning in a deeply disapproving way.

Whirl was not perturbed; he looked out the porthole with all appearance of indiffference. “I know it happened. I guess the Institute had their reasons.”

Rung made a fist. “There is no reason good enough for meddling with someones mind without their consent. And that's what the New Institute was doing.”

“So you were doing 'good work' by constructing a way to reverse it.” Whirl focused on him, body language neutral.

“Yes.”

“'Kay. Go on.”

Rung flexed his right hand. “The first few drafts of the program were rough, imprecise- brutal. We used dynamic models to test it, models that mimicked a processor damaged by mnemosurgery, then applied the program to them. I imagine there must have been mnemosurgeons within the network who were able to provide details on how certain techniques were applied. But our first few versions of the program were too destructive; they stripped away the damage and left nothing in its place. That wasn't our intention.”

He examined the seams in his palmar armour, watching the small plates shift, exposing glimpses of internal structure as he opened and closed his hand. “You don't care how it works; I'll spare you the trials and triumphs we went through perfecting it.”

“Thank god.”

“But it _worked_. It wasn't perfect, it's still... I imagine it would be painful to endure. I never saw it applied to an individual, rather than a model. But I saw the results. It does work.” He shook his head. “But once we had a working version of the program, somehow its existence was leaked to the New Institute, and they came after us. There is no 'us' though, not really.”

“The benefit of a decentralized operation,” said Whirl, nodding.

“We scattered, but the program couldn't be broken up any more, not the way it had been when we were building it. We had to make it disappear. Or at least, appear to disappear.” Rung glanced at the porthole. He shifted in his seat, crossed one leg over the other.

“So encrypt it,” said Whirl.

He seemed interested in this. Despite Rung's prudent suspicion of Whirl as the counter-agent to his mission, he didn't truly feel that the helicopter was a threat, at least not to himself in an espionage capacity. Whirl's interest seemed to be the interest any bot might have in a program as mythic as the one Rung described.

“We did. The information was coded into a series of colours by a bot with colour-grapheme synaesthesia. This bot saw the individual glyphs in the lines of code as different colours and translated the program into an abstract image where the colour of each successive pixel represented a glyph in the lines of code.”

“Huh,” said Whirl. He leaned his helm on an open claw. “But that sounds like it could be broken by trial and error, once the image was recognized _as_ a code. Run enough computational power against it and it'll re-translate into the original lines of code.”

Rung raised an eyebrow. “You've worked with cryptography before?”

Whirl shrugged one shoulder. “If it's to do with filthy-dark black ops missions, then yeah, you can bet I've probably dealt with it in some capacity.”

“I didn't know that.”

Whirl cocked his head, optic contracting. “Yeah, well, you told me that you were nothing more than an _observer_. This program-writing stuff is pretty active for a mere _observer._ ”

“You had a gun to my head,' Rung reminded him. “My job is difficult to define.”

“Yeah. No kidding.” They eyed each other for a moment. Then Whirl cast his gaze sideways and gestured for Rung to continue. “Tell me about the encryption.”

“Our cryptographer also perceived _sound_ as colours,” Rung continued. “For the second layer of encryption, the number and colour of the pixels in the image were conserved, but our synaesthetic friend re-ordered them by matching each pixel to a single tone in a musical composition.”

“Wait, wait,” said Whirl. “They turned the characters in the code into coloured pixels in an image, then they translated each pixel into a note and wrote a song with it?”

“No, they used an _existing_ piece of music with the same range of colours as the image to re-order the pixels.”

“Music has colours?”

“It did to this bot.”

“So they made a new image?”

“No.”

Whirl tapped his claw against his knee. “Okay, wait. Code into coloured pixels that make an image, pixels in the image get rearranged to _match_ notes in a song, therefore the code is all scrambled up now.” Rung nodded an affirmative. Whirl narrowed his optic. “So in the end, you just have a song. If you don't know about the colour step, you don't even know there's a code to decrypt because all you have is a song.” His optic flared. “Sneaky, doc.”

“Yes,” said Rung. “And the piece of music was pre-existing, so it drew no attention to itself. Even if you did know about the colour step, the particular colour-sound associations are unique to one bot; that bot is the key to their own code.”

Whirl eyed him. “Guessing that bot's probably dead?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“But... they made decryption keys. The access codes you were talking about.”

“Yes,” said Rung. “I think Skids has one or more of them because the piece of music that our cryptographer used was the _Empyrean Suite_.”

Whirl leaned forward, staring. Then he raised a claw and pointed emphatically at Rung's face. “You... are... _so_ much cooler than you let on! Observer, my aft! I've heard that damn song before, hundreds of times. Never thought it was anything except music.”

“It isn't anything except music. Unless you have the decryption keys activated in your processor when you perceive it. The first key translates the notes back into colours. The second key puts the colour pixels back in sequential order. There is a third key that translates the colours into characters but, as you pointed out, that final key isn't necessary. You can substitute brute force computing, if necessary.”

Whirl shifted, crossing one leg over the opposite knee. “Yeah, but I don't get why Skids would be hearing the Suite. Shouldn't he be seeing colours or something?”

“No, not unless the keys are active. But if he's had his memory wiped and the Suite persists in his memory, it's because he's carrying it in his _non-volatile memory_ , in his _spark_ , where it can't be erased. That's where all of us who were involved in the project carry a copy of it.”

Whirl's optic widened. “He's one of you, then.”

“He doesn't know it. And I wasn't sure until last night, when he told me about the Empyrean Suite.”

“He's not supposed to be here. I mean, he wasn't supposed to be on the ship. Was he?”

“I don't know,” said Rung, finding his spirits unexpectedly bolstered by Whirl's recognition of the same unlikely truth that had unnerved him the night before.

“And you're on this ship too. Two of you. You weren't informed of his involvement?”

Rung shook his head. “If it even _is_ involvement. It could still be a coincidence.”

Whirl gave a sharp chuff of air from his thoracic intakes. “Yeah, right.” He stood, abruptly animated, movements quick and sharp. “You're right. There's something going on here. That's too many coincidences.” Rung realized his animation was excitement. “Enough talking. What's your plan? You got a target for me?”

“A target? Oh, no! I need more information, and I don't anticipate- well, having to kill anyone.”

“You don't anticipate _having to kill anyone?_ How did you even survive the war?” said Whirl incredulously.

Rung didn't say anything for a moment, letting the silence hang between them. “If the success of the mission hinges on someone's death, then I will give you a target. But right now, we need information and subtlety.”

Whirl sat down again. “Have you ever killed anyone? Directly? With your own- well, I guess not your hands exactly, but with a weapon?”

Whirl spoke so easily and enthusiastically about death and horror that for a moment Rung chalked this question up to morbid antagonism. But the helicopter was studying him with a level gaze, motionless, not crowding him or needling him with further, graphic questions.

“Yes,” said Rung.

Whirl was still for a moment, then nodded once. “Well,” he said, and rose again, “let me know when you've decided. I'll go see about swapping our spots in the comm queue.”

“Thank you.”

Whirl left.

Rung deactivated the dampener/jammer and replaced it inside the compartment in his leg. Then he sat for a long time and thought about the bot he had executed.

 


	4. Well-Meaning & Unprepared

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rung contemplates the life he took, checks in with Control, and suspects everyone.
> 
> Oh yeah, and Overlord gets out.

The memory was corrupted. It had been for some time, by intense emotional associations, from obsessive viewing, through the inevitable slow consumption of age and bit rot. The audio was hollow and distant, distorted like voices underwater. The visuals had desaturated.

The emotions remained.

Confusion and denial at first; disbelief and anger close behind. It began as an argument; the memory laid down without sound because Rung had been too over-wrought at the time to process the words, his or theirs, too hurt and furious and lost to remember anything that either of them said.

Then came blinding hate: a mixture of humiliation, heart-break, crumbling disappointment and loss; white-hot and culminating in Rung's hand convulsing on the trigger of a laser pistol that he immediately dropped.

Then there was guilt. And emptiness. And self-recrimination. Those feelings had lasted for years, clung to the original, muddled memory until they enveloped it. Rung had spent yet more years peeling back these after-emotions until he could confront the source-emotions beneath. Now, he could touch them all without much effort, calm and rational. Still, though, he questioned whether he had done right back then and if he could again.

Questions, still, and all he had done was shoot one bot.

Fortress Maximus had seen so much more, had suffered so much more.

Rung padded down the corridor, taking a perhaps suspiciously circuitous route towards the brig, and wondered how others coped. He knew, in a studied, academic way, how people coped with taking lives, or how they coped with having things- choices, limbs, friends- taken from them. But he did not know, in the visceral, personal sense that mattered the most, how to cope with the life he had taken. It was only one life, but it was the only one that Rung had ever ended and so it mattered more to him than any other death.

The brig was not on the lowest level of the ship. The  _Lost Light,_  despite the intervening excitement it had seen, had not originally been purposed as a military vessel. Perceptor hypothesized that it was a long-term exploration vehicle, what with the arrangement of living quarters, medical bay, and laboratories. Those areas were the only unaltered aspects of the ship's internal structure. Everything else- the bar, cargo and shuttle bays, even the bridge- were constructed with more recent materials and designs.

Ultra Magnus had re-purposed a collection of rooms to serve as the brig. Pre-brig punishments consisted of supervised renovation of the area until it resembled detention facilities to Magnus' standards. One of the reasons Magnus had chosen the area was because it did  _not_  occupy an external wall. Too easy for would-be rescuers to blast a hole in the ship and abscond with prisoners, leaving the  _Lost Light_ damaged in their wake.

Rung's own office was on the lowest level, however, and so if anyone noticed his route- which they probably wouldn't- he could claim the perfectly reasonable excuse of swinging by his office for information/privacy/files before he made his visit to Fortress Maximus.

He couldn't be sure what Red Alert had meant in his message by 'the basement'. Red Alert had never explained  _where_  he had been when he recorded a voice, super-slowed and begging for death, but he had said 'down' and 'basement' and Rung took that to mean somewhere on the lowest levels of the ship, so he started out from his office.

Rung walked slowly, glancing up and down from the datapad in his hands. He listened, and he monitored the environmental data on the pad, looking up when there was anything remotely out of the ordinary reported by the pad's sensors. Air currents, electro-magnetic fields, multi-spectrum light emissions beyond those that Rung could see, peculiar power draws on the ship's resources, infra- and ultra-sonic noise (to a certain maximum; the scanner pad had it's limits); all potential indicators of... what?

Rung continued. If he had a choice in the matter, he would prefer a literal monster like the Sparkeater, though the voice recording seemed to indicate a figurative monster of the all-too-Cybertronian variety. A stowaway? Or a crew member, pretending to be something they were not?

The scanner beeped. It registered an area of unexpectedly high energy usage ahead and as Rung continued to walk down the corridor, the spike remained at a constant level. Rung paused. The level did not fluctuate. Not an anomaly, then. Something was making a consistent draw on the  _Lost Light's_ power grid.

There was nothing in the vicinity that had any right to be using that much power. Rung scrutinized the area, with his own eyes and all the available analyses in the scanner pad. There was nothing. Not just nothing out of the ordinary: there was  _nothing_ \- no reason in the area for the level of energy use. The energy left the ship's grid and just went... nowhere.

_There's something here._

Rung shuttered his optics and turned off his aural sensors. He pulled his personal electro-magnetic field in close, so close it disappeared beneath his thin plating. Then he reached out with his left hand until his fingers brushed the wall. He didn't press. He only wanted the lightest contact, enough for coarse pressure sensors to register and nothing more.

He diverted his attention away from his fingertips and let them drift along the wall as he walked. A few paces forward and he felt a tiny tremor. He drew his hand away as soon as it registered, brought his other senses back online, and replayed the data from his fingertips. His fourth finger, shorter and so drifting two centimetres along the surface ahead of his third, bumped over a seam. That contact was subtle, almost forgettable. But his third finger bumped over the same seam a moment later, somewhat more roughly, and solidified its existence to Rung's senses.

There was still nothing to see on the wall when he examined it. Rung stared up at it, scrutinizing the way the light fell on the texture, the smudges and flaws in the surface. How much of it wasn't actually  _there_ was impossible to tell. Rung was familiar with attention disrupters. He had sometimes joked that he must be equipped with the technology himself, the way the attention of others tended to slide right over him. But he wasn't fitted with such things: Rung simply practised being unmemorable; this wall was actively, intentionally obscuring something, and that meant that someone wanted it that way for a reason.

_There is something here,_  he thought.  _And now I have proof._ He balled his left hand into a fist.

The joints of his fingers locked, quivering. He looked down, startled, and his wrist locked up. Then his elbow. Rung gasped and grabbed his left shoulder with his right hand just as it made an ominous click and the joint seized.

"Hrrk-!" he managed, and then he was plunged into darkness.

It was a known darkness, a remembered darkness. Unlike the previous memory error, Rung was fully aware this time that his processor had glitched. That knowledge did not stop the memory from unfolding and he watched/remembered, helpless to stop it.

The memory gripped his joints just as the magnetic medical slab had done hundreds of years ago, immobilizing him beneath the gaze of two vague shapes.

_"Dammit! He's dumped everything."_

Rung had done what he was trained to do if captured: purged the entire contents of his own memory. It was commonly done among operatives carrying sensitive information, commonly enough that there were protocols for backing up one's memory before delicate missions so that one could reinstate their identity after retrieval. If retrieval occurred.

_"He's no good to us now. Take out the brain module; if whatever he had was really that important, maybe the techs can tease something out of the ruins."_

Rung's memory was never saved, though. It didn't need to be. When Rung purged his processor, he did so by dumping the information straight into his spark.  _His spark._  It was, he was told repeatedly by handlers and technicians and strategists, what made him such an asset to the network. No mnemosurgeon could read a spark; no dissection and analysis could show the shape of lost information once that light was put out. Rung could never be compromised and Rung never forgot himself.

So he remembered every ungentle pressure as the two Decepticons had manipulated his head and neck, every tiny scrape and crunch as they had pried his helm open, the vibration of their electric tools, and the spear of pain that shoved through the crown of his head and mercifully knocked him off-line.

The darkness continued for an uncounted length of time. Rung did not know if he was prolonging it to soothe his own nerves or if it was a by-product of the memory error.

When the darkness lifted and Rung's vision returned to normal, present-day, he found himself just around the corner from the brig. His limbs were no longer locked up and he was standing at ease, the sensor pad in his right hand held out before him as though he were studying it.

He must have come here while his processor malfunctioned. Rung took a few moments to gather his wits. He found it encouraging that this time he had recognized the memory for what it was. He guessed that since his end goal had been to visit the brig, his processor had set about fulfilling that goal when no other coherent input was forth-coming. Rung did not regularly allow this 'auto-pilot' state to take over, but there were some bots, especially those with physically repetitious jobs, that did. It was hardly uncommon. Rung was encouraged by the fact that he had activated it during the error with the apparent intention of carrying on to his goal.

Rung debated for a moment- clearly, he needed to report this incident to First Aid. But he was already at the brig and he did wish to speak with Fort Max. The glitch was an honest reason to keep their meeting short.

He drew himself up and rounded the corner.

It took days for Rung to piece together what happened next.

* * *

 

He was lucid, and he spoke gently to Fortress Maximus. He was suffused with hope and empathy, and he took Max's enormous hand between his own, assuring him that Rung bore him no grudge for his actions. Max had suffered enough. Near the end of this coherent memory, Max apologized to him.

Then strobing red light and klaxons shattered his lucidity. The cacophony sent him reeling into another treacherous memory, and he fought it because the  _Lost Light_ was under attack and he adamantly refused to be useless. Drift's voice, hoarse and piercing, on the comm, asking for Fort Max, begging for his strength. Rung stepped out of the cell and the energy barrier closed behind him- the guard had gone, rushed to help as Rodimus' voice pealed from the public address system-  _"Send everyone!"_ \- and Rung stared at the keypad as memory threatened to overwhelm his sight. He stabbed at the glyphs but the memory was winning.

"I don't know the code," he gasped to Fort Max. "I've forgotten-" The big bot was on his feet, eyes wide, teeth bared. "I can't- I can't get you out-!"

Rung blacked out. He remained standing, just barely balanced, and he could hear and feel, but it was all subdued, soft and muffled and distant. It would be easy to succumb and the blackness in his vision was warm and inviting. Rung wavered.

"Rung,  _please!_ " Max's voice was a thread, a whisper. " _I can't let this happen again!"_

Again, thought Rung, puzzling over the words. Rung had been here before, or somewhere like it, somewhere black and soft. His right hand was hot, too hot, circuits melting, and his jaw too, his tongue thrust forward by the heat behind it, white-hot, stabbing out through his eyes-

He felt himself falling.

" _Rung!"_

He jerked alert, colour flooding his vision. He was still standing, hesitating over the keypad. The code flashed through his memory and he aimed shaking fingers at the glyphs, terrified that he would lose the code again before he could enter it. Max burst from the cell.

"Go!" Rung urged him. Max grabbed Rung around the waist with one hand and took off at a dead run.

He remembered this part only in bits and pieces. One sense or another was malfunctioning; he couldn't seem to keep them all online at once. They flickered in turn, back to heat and falling and tempting blackness.

Max ran. Rung clung to him. The lift crashed to a halt between floors; Rung slithered out, Max was too big. Max gave him instructions, how to re-start the lift - there was a panel, there, on the wall where Rung could perform a manual over-ride. Rung staggered, hesitated. Max shouted, pulled at the doors, pulled at the floor, but the lift wouldn't budge and he couldn't squeeze out of it.

"Over-ride," said Rung. "Go to over-ride."

His hab suite was on this floor.

Somehow he had his staff. There was a lot of noise. He needed help, Max needed help. Rodimus screamed-  _"Magnus!"_ \- and there was a terrible crash and a torrent of laughter and suddenly Rung's head was functioning perfectly again. He found the control panel, programmed the over-ride, heard the lift lurch even with the floor and Fort Max came storming towards the chaos.

He fired his cannon and rushed past Rung. Rung found First Aid, sidled up beside him, couldn't impose on him, not with Ultra Magnus laid out on the floor, bleeding, ruptured, and dimming. Rung stared. Magnus had attention disrupters inside his armour. Rung felt himself weaving in and out of the blackness again.

Suddenly it was quiet. Not the silence of deafness and malfunctioning aural sensors, but the absence of action and chaos. Someone whimpered. Rung thought it might have been Drift. He looked around but he couldn't see the ex-Decepticon over Magnus' prone form. First Aid and Tailgate were moving beside him. They made noise but it was inconsequential noise, it wasn't battle noise. Rung couldn't help them. Rung would only be in the way.

Someone else groaned in pain and Rung realized that there was a heap of people on the floor, tens, dozens of injured bots. The air was thick and grainy with blistered metal and ionized gas. The blackness threatened, framing his vision, seeping into the base of his processor, pulling at his shoulders.

_I am in imminent danger of accidentally giving myself away_ , he observed.  _I am malfunctioning. I need to rest._

He stood with the help of the staff, leaning his fragile, shivering body against it. He felt cold despite the proliferation of plasma burns on the walls and steam coiling up from the bodies around him. Slowly, he surveyed the tangle of bots as the blackness swallowed his vision again.  _I need a safe place to rest._

Sometime later, he woke to Skids' worried voice and a gentle shake of his shoulder.

"You hurt? Hey. Hey, Rung, buddy, come on..." Skids' hands patted around his shoulders. "Whirl? You awake?"

"Rung's in shock," said First Aid's voice, sharp, full of strain. "Whirl's unconscious. Come on."

"But-"

"Triage, Skids! They're fine, comparatively!" snapped First Aid and drew Skids away.

Rung took stock with his optics still shuttered. He was on the floor, mostly on his back, huddled against Whirl. Yes. He had found the helicopter, off-line, sprawled on his side. Whirl knew who Rung was- both parts of Rung- so Whirl was the safest choice. Whirl was a good liar; if Rung said something incriminating, Whirl could make up a cover. Would he? Rung thought he might. So he lay down beside the helicopter, draped his legs over Whirl's, pillowed his head and shoulders against the underside of his cockpit, and turned his face away from the pile of comrades all around them.

The world returned in bits and pieces. Rung sorted them while he lay, not-quite-awake in Whirl's not-quite-embrace. The alarms had come first, then Rodimus' call to arms over the ship's PA.

_Overlord_ , who Rung had assured Fort Max was disembodied, his spark permanently sealed in a white-out vacuum, had somehow boarded the  _Lost Light_. Someone had lied to Rung, and Rung had unknowingly lied to Max. And Drift had known that Max wanted – needed – a re-match, so he had called down to the brig in desperation because at least Fortress Maximus stood a fighting chance.

Others were not so lucky. Rung heard names: called desperately, choked back, whispered pitifully. He began to make a list of those names. He organized the flashes of sight and instants of sound that he could recall until he had a timeline from the first alarm that had plunged him into a broken deluge of memories, til now.

Whirl tremored beneath him. Rung swivelled his legs off of Whirl's and struggled to sit up.

"Are you all right?" he asked, tentative, and edged a little further away. Whirl was not known for waking gracefully from unconsciousness.

The helicopter lurched as though to rise and shuddered back into stillness. "Yeah," he said.

"I think your shoulder is dislocated."

"Yeah."

"Do you want help-"

"No! Scrap!" Whirl jerked himself into a sitting position, his left arm hanging forward limply. "Is that slagger dead?"

Rung didn't know. "He's... he's gone, at least."

Whirl glanced around. "What a mess," he muttered, and clambered to his feet. "That's a lot of blood." Rung levered himself up with his staff and followed Whirl's gaze. The floor was fuschia with congealing energon where Magnus had fallen, smeared and tracked in every direction, but the big bot was gone, as were First Aid, Ratchet, and Ambulon.

"It  _is_  a lot of blood," Rung agreed in a hollow voice.

Whirl turned, attention skipping across the carnage. He said nothing for almost a minute. "You gonna help me with this?" He nodded to his left arm.

"I don't know if I can."

"Then why'd you offer?"

"I was going to offer to help you sit up, if you couldn't do so on your own. You didn't let me finish."

Whirl grunted. "Peek at the back and tell me if the joint's bent or if it's just been yanked out." He gestured over his damaged shoulder with his other claw.

Rung moved behind him and squinted at the damage. "A piece of the..." Rung didn't know the correct anatomical term; Whirl's build was different from his own and included parts that Rung didn't have. "Part of the joint is snapped. The humeral head is intact but this- this triangular bit needs to be replaced." He traced the piece in question on Whirl's other shoulder. "Let me make a sling for you until medibay can see to you."

Whirl let him. He followed Rung as Rung made his way around the scene. Those who had suffered little more than scrapes and burns, like Skids, had been co-opted into performing triage and rendering temporary aid while the medical staff turned their attention to the more serious injuries.

"They're not working on him," said Whirl, pausing as the surgical suite doors slid open, permitting Rodimus to exit. Rung's attention was snagged by the captain's stiff, angry walk. He swept past Rung and Whirl without acknowledgement.

Rung turned back to Whirl.

"On who?"

"Ultra Magnus." The doors slid closed and Whirl looked away. "Guess when you nearly-die enough, docs figure you're tough enough to recover on your own."

Rung was too drained to compose a reply that was neither hard truth – that Magnus was beyond hope of saving and the medical team had chosen to address the wounded they felt could be treated – nor out-right, comforting lie, so he said nothing.

* * *

 

No one was using the communications suite and no one was monitoring it. Rung hadn't intended to sneak in and use the equipment; he had needed to walk, no destination in mind, as he thought over Red Alert's warning, Rung's own suspicions, and Overlord's attack on the ship. But the suite was empty and unguarded.

Rung activated it. He waited while the system rebooted, initiated a handshake with several 'local' transmission sites – local being a relative term in deep space – and acknowledged its readiness with a soft chime.

The entire ship itself functioned as a both transmitter and receiver, emitting and collecting signals across its vast hull. The size of the transmission/reception surface improved both functions, and as Rung watched, local transmission sites began to bounce their own signals off the  _Lost Light_ for improved clarity and distance.

Cybertronians did not tend to build small ships. Firstly, because their intentions in space were exploration and conquest, which required travelling enormous distances with large crews while staying in contact with other ships and their homeworld; and secondly because there were enough individuals capable of assuming forms worthy for short-distance space transit and combat.

This tendency made Cybertronian ships a nuisance sometimes, as they could swamp local frequencies with their chatter when they came into populated ports if they had too much comm traffic. Nowadays, Cybertronian crews kept their chatter tightly regulated to a few frequencies and other cultures were happy to use their ships to boost signals of their own, free of charge.

This made them a useful tool for signal piracy. With so much transmitting power and so much comm traffic in both directions, it was easy to slip a signal of one's own into the cacophony around a Cybertronian vessel, unnoticed, or piggyback someone else's message.

Rung waited until there was a sufficient din of communication traffic and then picked a signal that would pass across Cybertron itself. He plugged his personal encryption into the comm suite, leaned forward and laced his fingers together.

It took a minute to establish contact.

"Report," said Control.

Rung flexed the fingers on his right hand.

"Why am I here?" he said quietly.

Control's image flickered; not a by-product of the distance between them but a deficiency in the appearance-masking program that Control wore. It may have attempted to translate some singular physical reaction made by Control into a gesture common to other frame types, a gesture that could not identify an aspect of Control's physique.  _Interesting._

"Your mission remains unchanged," replied Control.

"My mission," said Rung, "was to protect Rodimus-"

"Your mission is to  _accompany_  Rodimus," Control interrupted.

Rung opened his mouth to argue, then paused. Control was right. "You told me that Rodimus was important. Importance implies-"

"Your mission is not implied," said Control and there was no masking the sharpness of the tone.

Rung blinked. "Control, I don't understand.  _Overlord_  was on our ship. Placed here, by all apparent reckoning.  _Intentionally!_  Our engines malfunctioned leaving Cybertron, our communications equipment was damaged- I've had no way to contact you until now. How can I not arrive at the conclusion that there is some force acting counter to our mission, and that my role implied protection?"

"Your mission is to accompany Rodimus," Control repeated. "Accompany, observe, and report. Your mission is not to intervene or to ask why you were chosen." Control waited. Rung said nothing, though he could not school the frown off his face. "Report," Control asked again.

"Very well. Establish report parameters."

"Describe the physical status of the ship."

"Intact, mostly," Rung replied, feeling a greyness creeping into his mind as he did so. "As I said, the quantum engines malfunctioned just as we were taking off. The malfunction sent us across the galaxy, into deep space. The damage has been repaired; the ship is functional."

"Describe Rodimus' current attitude and intentions."

"He's angry," said Rung. "I spoke to him before contacting you. He's..." Rung paused to collect his impression of Rodimus. The Captain had kicked Rung out of his hab suite with a barely veiled threat of violence, but Drift had come in as Rung was leaving. Rung was relieved; if Rodimus fell to violence, Drift would be able to stand up to and calm him as Rung couldn't.

"He's angry that he couldn't defend the crew, that he wasn't the one to get Overlord off the ship," Rung summarized. "There were deaths, Control. He's humiliated, and more angry with himself because he's humiliated. He's sad."

"What do you predict he might do now?"

"Find and punish whoever is responsible for Overlord being on board in the first place. He knows he can't make the crew forget that he didn't handle Overlord but he can restore some measure of respect by seeking justice."

Control was quiet for a moment, his image unchanging. "Have you investigated Overlord's presence?"

"No."

"What are your preliminary thoughts?"

"He was placed here, attached to the ship on purpose."

"By whom?"

Rung hesitated. "There is some _thing_  else acting within the same sphere as myself, something that I cannot see the shape of. A group or an individual; I can't tell."

"Have you any indication of their eventual goals?"

"My observations are rudimentary at this point but their interests appear to run counter to those of the network." There was some lag between them and for several long seconds, they each waited for the other to speak. "Did you know that there would be opposition to our interests on board the  _Lost Light_?"

"The possibility existed."

"Can you confirm it now?"

Control nodded once and said nothing.

Rung briefly shuttered his optics. "And I am to remain an observer."

Control's image flickered. "Continue your investigation and include further findings in your next report."

"Understood."

"Maintain observation of Rodimus," Control continued, "and report again in seventy-six standard hours."

"Understood."

Only after the connection was dissolved did Rung realize he had forgotten to mention his employment of Whirl as his field-assistant-cum-body-guard. He chose to lay the blame for this oversight on his head injury, which, he noted, he had also neglected to mention.

Well, he thought, Control had asked after Rodimus' disposition, not Rung's.

* * *

 

Rodimus was vigorously unapproachable for the next two days. He divided his time between medibay, where he watched Ultra Magnus slowly dwindle towards spark failure, throwing more and more desperate suggestions at the medics until they gently expelled him, and the bridge, where he demanded to be alone.

He was left alone, except by Drift. From the bridge, he issued orders, coordinated funeral rites for the dead, kept the crew updated on the status of their injured comrades, including Ultra Magnus, and generally held back chaos for forty-eight fragile hours. When he moved between the bridge and medibay, he did so with a fearful, apologetic sort of anger that made Rung deeply suspicious. Only Drift accompanied him and he often wore a similar expression. Rung watched, and worried.

The rest of the crew attempted, in their own ways, to regain some normalcy. Swerve opened the bar and those that found strength in companionship congregated there. Some found solace and order in clean-up and restoration. No small number joined Whirl on the firing range, all their anger and grief focused in their grip and their sight and the concussive force of live rounds.

Rung excused himself from First Aid's care as soon as he was able and joined Skids in the bar.

"Should you be out of medibay?" Skids asked.

"I'll live."

Skids' yellow eyes flashed wide in surprise for a second. "You've been hanging about with Whirl too much, Eyebrows. That nasty sense of humour is starting to wear off on you."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean-" Rung protested. Except he had meant it, unconsciously, and he had been hanging around Whirl. He hesitated, then gave up trying to salvage the statement, and sat down with a sigh. "Ultra Magnus isn't supposed to  _die_ ," he said and put his head in his hands.

Skids laid an arm around his shoulders and leaned in. "No," he agreed, "he's not."

They sat in silence for some time, neither of them drinking, leaning on each other.

"Someone on board must have known about Overlord," said Rung. "He couldn't have been put there, with all of that equipment, without inside access." He turned his head slightly and pressed his cheek against Skids' shoulder. "Someone travelled with us and did this. How..." he began, but couldn't continue, and shook his head.

"I don't know," said Skids.

* * *

 

Rodimus' inquisition into the party responsible for Overlord's presence concluded as Rung suspected it might: Drift confessed.

"Drift?" Skids whispered, for the third time. "But..."

Rung said nothing, chewing his lip and watching the ex-Decepticon stumble under the glares and sharp words of the crew as he made his way toward the shuttle bay and exile. Skids fell silent, lips pressing into a frown.

"I mean, I kind of get it," he said, after the shuttle departed and the crowd broke up. "Wanting to use Overlord as a- as a template for an Autobot 'Phase Sixer'. Trying to prove his dedication to the Autobot cause. But what was he thinking, bringing Overlord onto the ship? Who did he think was going to help him?" Skids folded his arms over his chest and shook his head. "This isn't a research mission. What was he  _thinking?_ "

"Probably that Overlord would be immobilized indefinitely," said Rung. He felt listless and it had nothing to do with his head injury.

"And now the command crew is-" Skids spread his hands. "No Second-in-Command, no Third-in-Command, and no Security Director either." He looked down at Rung. "Surely Rodimus understands that he can't do all of those jobs, plus be the Captain of the ship."

Rung suspected that Rodimus might once have believed he  _could_  fill every role himself, simultaneously, but Rodimus was now keenly aware of the crew's perception of him and his abilities. He would find others to perform the required duties. (They would not be  _replacements._ )

"He may doubt whether he can even be that, now," Rung murmured.

Swerve had mixed him a mild drink, muttering, "No charge." Rung took a sip, catching a glimpse of Chromedome across the bar. His gaze slid to the black-painted Autobrand on the mnemosurgeon's chest and he had to look away.

"Rodimus? Naw," said Skids. "He's steamed that Drift didn't tell him about the plan. That the sort of big dangerous project would be right up his alley. And Drift kept it from him."

"Mmhmm," said Rung, into his drink.

Skids rested his chin on his fist. "I don't see this being Drift's idea all on his own, though. He must've had help back on Cybertron. But he knew what the Phase Sixers could do. Did he honestly think he could keep control of Overlord by himself?" Skids pursed his lips. "Maybe he did. No wonder he and Rodimus are – were – such good friends."

Rung contemplated his drink. "They have a lot in common."

"But you know, Drift's – well, a bit flakey maybe, but he's not stupid. Maybe whoever he was working with only told him that the  _Lost Light_ would be carrying something essential to developing a Phase Sixer. Didn't tell him it was  _Overlord._ Nobody who's in on a secret of that magnitude ever really knows the whole story, right?"

Rung held his cup with both hands to keep them steady. "I suppose that's true." The listless feeling was curdling into something more actively unpleasant.

"Segregate information, protect the operation," Skids continued. Then he fixed a penetrating expression on Rung. "You okay? You look awful. Speaking as a friend, who cares about your well-being."

"I'm just tired, Skids. And... grieving. I'll be all right."

* * *

 

Skids' words stuck in his processor like shrapnel.

_Nobody who's in on a secret of that magnitude..._

Rung thought he knew Rodimus well enough – and knew the ways of clandestine operations well enough - to be certain that the Captain had been fully aware of Overlord's presence on board. It didn't seem like something Rodimus himself would mastermind. Rodimus had been an operative, not a controller. As had Drift.

_...ever really knows the whole story._

Rung sat down carefully on the edge of his recharge slab. He was supposed to be resting.

_Could I have done something?_ He had put off asking himself this question until he was alone and guaranteed to be left that way.  _If I had remembered Red Alert sooner, looked through his effects, found the video... If I had searched the 'basement' earlier, and notified Rodimus or Ultra Magnus when I found the anomaly-_

He had been standing right in front of the door to Overlord's cell.

He had been so concerned with his own revelation to Whirl, so tied up with his suspicions and observations. Yes, in the long run, Rung did good work; whatever Control  _wasn't_  telling him, well, that was acceptable because compartmentalization meant survival, but Rung wondered: if he had been less involved in his network mission and more vigilant...

It was a futile thought spiral. Rung could continue down it, examining every choice he had made since he boarded the  _Lost Light,_ and make himself sick with guilt and worry, and utterly useless in the aftermath. Or he could choose to accept the reality of the dead and exiled and bitterly wounded, and do something to help those who remained.

Rung stretched out on the recharge slab. Again, his thoughts flickered back to the life he had taken many years ago, and the betrayal that precipitated it.

_Segregate information, protect the operation._ But the information had ended up segregated in the wrong hands and Rung-

Rung clenched his right fist.

He couldn't take that back either. He could only live with his actions, and attempt to do good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has become my lunch-time project at work. It's nice to mess about with Rung's problems and take a break from real life. Hopefully now that I've carved out a specific amount of time to work on it consistently, I can update more frequently. (fingers crossed)
> 
> Chapters 3 & 4 were written simultaneously (more or less; I kept going back to tweak things in 3 so that 4 would make sense).
> 
> Huge thanks to Owlix for betaing and culling my extra commas, and Dean for tech-checking! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Owlix for beta'ing away my extra commas and letting me ramble about mecha-physiology. Thank you also to my software architect buddy for explaining how computer memory works. :)
> 
> I will update this story as frequently as life allows. Current estimate: monthly.


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